Early flight makes for butterflies

Just a sorta random one.

There is a rough balance between the three big powers of the ECM (Spanish/Portuguese blend-speaking USA equivalent, if more socialist-democratic), the Han Oligarchy (almost anarcho-capitalistic, but fiercely nationalistic) and the technocratic and pushy inhabitants of the Nordensee Alliance and their associated states. The collapse of the Hutterite regimes of France and Japan means that the Iron Triangle no longer counts as a fourth Great Power, although the Atlantean regime continues to forment trouble from its south seas strongholds.

Most of Spanish America was colonized and settled by the British, although the French and the Hansa got a hand in the settlement of South America. Islam has been quicker in embracing modern science and technology, and there are a lot of technocrats in the Middle East, and the Mullahs are all over cyberspace. India was only partially colonized by several different European powers, with the Chinese also putting their oar in, and as a result ended up fragmented into a multitude of states, with several wars in the 20th century: the mostly Hindu south has united in a loose federation for defensive and free-trade purposes.

Africa is mostly post-colonial (More Ispanian and Hanse/Dutch - although the French got the Cape -, less British) and a bit of a mess, although the Islamic bits are a bit (relatively to the rest of the world: it's richer than OTL) better off than OTL. The Yilmazids were more enthusiastic prosthelizers than their OTL Ottoman equivalents, and have held onto the Balkans by the process of solidly Islamicizing the area (the majority of Greek Orthodox Greeks are in Italian territory). Catholicism is more broadly dominant than OTL, thanks to the supremacy of council and elected Church representatives over Popes since the early Modern Era (although there still are the National Popes of Sweden and France before 1857).

It is a more technologically advanced world than ours, mayhaps by 50 in some fields (aerospace, materials science) possibly only 20 in others (computer science - although those all-interference optical laser computers are pretty cool, nontheless). It is an aviation and space-besotted world: the notion of human flight has been "mainstream" for a long time, due to the development of man-carrying kites by the Arabs and the hot air balloon by the Chinese during the middle ages. Humand first landed on the Moon in 1924, and there are colonies of one state or another (and some multinational corporations) on the Moon and Mars, space stations galore, and various gimcrack mini-space stations and Moon diggings run by various private associations and multibillionaire eccentrics.

Flying cars and sunpowered dirigibles and floating cities in the Indian ocean. Closed-cycle communes applying space tech back on Earth, and the techno-nomads and their food-making genetically engineered tanks of algae on their backs, on endless pilgrimages to everywhere and nowhere. Giant solar farms and huge breeder reactors in the Gobi. Global warming is increasingly serious, but all three powers see it as a technological challenge to be met, not something to be denied or 'adopted to' (AKA you guys will have to consume less)