Hypotheticals are possibly situations, statements or questions about something imaginary rather than something real. Hypotheticals could deal with the concept of “what if?”‘.

Hypotheticals could be important because they provide a means for understanding what we would do if the world was different. Although this may assist our understanding of risk, and help us plan and create a new and better future, hypotheticals also help us understand the past, and why things happened or how things work. For example, in seeking to understand why a war started we could ask: “What if the parties had talked more first? Would they have worked out a better way of solving their problems? Could war have been averted?” Hypotheticals about the past are challenging to consider, as it is not possible to enter the past to change things according to our hypotheticals and determine what then may have occurred. — Wikipedia

Counterfactual history, also sometimes referred to as virtual history, is a form of historiography that attempts to answer “what if” questions known as counterfactuals. The method seeks to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. It has produced a book genre which is variously called alternative history, speculative history, or hypothetical history. — Wikipedia