Do we know when the Blade Runner's universe splits from our own?

Question

Blade Runner universe is packed with references to our own: cities, advertising, popular singers, political institutions, etc. It's not our universe, since we are living 2018 and we are clearly not close to the achievements of this Universe technology (off-world colonies and replicants most exemplary). The geopolitical landscape it's pretty different too.

The 1982 movie is set in the future and could suffer from being too optimistic regarding the development of new technology, as it is risky to predict/imagine the worlds state only 40 years in the future. But Blade Runner 2049 has been released with knowledge that the technology is currently not feasible and the historical events are different, so (hopefully) someone involved may have thought of a reason for the different development of events.

In Phillip K Dick's novel (by the way, while writing this right now I get the K reference), nuclear war makes a clear changing point although others are possible (the introduction of one of the novel technologies for example). I don't know if such a motive was clearly stated for the films universe.

My question is: Do we know when and how did the film's universe became so different from our own?

Answer 1

At the latest, the Blade Runner future had split off by 1982.

During Deckerd's video-phone conversation in the bar with Rachel, you can see the Bell Telephone logo on the machine he uses.

In real life, on January 8, 1982, Bell System agreed to make itself defunct as a result of anti-monopoly actions by the U.S. federal government against its parent company, AT&T. By 1984, Bell System ceased to exist, and by 1987 AT&T had adopted the logo that's familiar today.

There are a number of brands in Blade Runner that are defunct today in the supposed "Blade Runner curse," including PanAm which folded in 1991. But Bell is the only brand that saw its death knell before the film had even been released. Assuming that Ridley Scott didn't intentionally put in any anachronisms, it seems safe to say this is the earliest divergence from his vision of the future.

Answer 2

I think the divergence actually happens in Germany in the early 30s. I say this because it would appear that the Nazis may have funded a group of scientists working on early computer systems that went far beyond enigma but still came too late to help Hitler and Himmler win the war. When Americans and Russians marched into Germany, the Americans got the lion's share of the computer scientists as well as the rocket scientists while the Russians got the bioweapons, materials engineering, and chemical weapons guys.

At some point, the technology developed for military use by the Americans in the computer science field emerged as commercial tech in the mid-eighties, possibly earlier, allowing brands like Atari and Pan-Am to survive where they might have once had to die off or go bankrupt owing to government disbursement of tech for wargaming being used for actual commercialized gaming, computation and communications tech, missile and drone guidance systems reviving the fortunes of airlines like Pan-Am and management software that made even companies like Adidas rise to outshine later competitors which in this world never took off.

Plus the survival of the Soviets without the cold war ending with the collapse of the Soviet system but rather its evolution into something that clearly trades with the West like a part of a global economy suggests that the events of the cold war, as well as the development of American laws around commerce, evolved substantially differently, tending to cement old players in the economy in place rather than displace them or disrupt their grip on important technological innovations in the marketplace.

So it would seem that stuff that may have begun as merely the difference between Nazis approving and funding a project in the late thirties there that they failed to here resulted in a butterfly effect of compounding changes to the timeline from what we're familiar with until their universe develops androids and replicants and FTL drive to colonize other planets by the 2010s while we're mostly into cellphones and mass communication and disrupting finance and management systems that they managed to maintain.

Answer 3

In the context of the first film, there is no divergence. While it seems unlikely that any reasonable technological developments starting in 1982 could have lead to the world of 2019 on screen, the filmmakers clearly took existing things (like contemporary companies) and just had them around in 2019.

Things get more complex with 2049, since it was purposefully created as part of an alternate timeline. Given the existence of the USSR in 2049, one has to assume that some time after 1982, something happened to arrest the deterioration of the Soviet Union. The fact that they are trading with the West implies an end to the Cold War (and, perhaps, a more free market economy).

As an aside, I run a Blade Runner RPG (using the Cepheus system) and as far as my "head canon" goes, I have the break point earlier, in 1969. The Russians land on the Moon first, expanding and accelerating the Space Race and sending technological development off in weird directions (vid phones, replicants and FTL travel, but no cell phones and clunky computers). But, OC, none of that is in the films.