It's not my intention to write a piece of fiction. It's a thought experiment I am trying to prettify. I want to ask questions like "would they have something like women's lib on the other side?" or "would they have public key cryptography?" or "what would their art have in common with our art?"
I am quite surprised to find "prettify" is already in Chrome's spell check dictionary.
Are you interested in what the cultures / economics / politics look like, or are you interested in what the technologies look like? It seems to me that stuff like public key cryptography is in some sense the optimal answer to an engineering problem- and so if you have the problem and the engineering skill, then you will find that answer eventually.
For the cultures / economics / politics, then it depends on your view of history. Would the idea of liberty have happened the same way without a New World to expand into? It's really not clear. Could you have an ...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.