Columbus’ return to Spain.
His failure to return discourages further attempts for a while; and when contact is eventually made, it isn’t Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Reconquista looking to continue its momentum.
Meanwhile, the New World is made aware of Europe and perhaps acquires some resistance to Old World diseases before any larger confrontations.
Interesting point! So basically, if Columbus hadn’t returned successfully, Spain’s push into the New World might’ve slowed down, giving the indigenous peoples more time to get used to European contact and maybe even build some resistance to diseases before major conflicts happened.
That, and Spain (or whoever else) wouldn’t be coming in fresh off the surrender of Granada, with the attitude that all non-Christian states must be conquered as a matter of principle.
Exactly without that post Granada mindset, expansion wouldn’t have been driven by the same “conquest by principle” attitude, which could’ve changed a lot of outcomes.
The start.
Pretty obvious.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Yeah, that opening really didn’t win any popularity contests maybe should’ve skipped it.
When that nun destroyed Archimedes' math book that had a bunch of pre-calculus stuff in it that wouldn't be discovered again for centuries.
Imagine if that book had led to the development of calculus, one of the most important tools in science for modeling the universe, much earlier than Newton and Leibniz.
That loss is mind-blowing to think about. If those ideas had survived and been built on, math and science could’ve jumped ahead centuries calculus arriving that early would’ve completely reshaped how we understand the universe.
The collapse of the Soviet Union
Yeah, the collapse of the Soviet Union really reshaped the whole global order.
Bill Clinton fully admits to smoking weed in college.
Yeah, the infamous “I didn’t inhale” era hard to imagine that even being controversial today.
There have been many horrible events, but recency bias, I would be interested in what if Hitler never came to power, there was no WWII, and no Holocaust. Would his failure to forge a path to power have prevented many of today's happenings and not put the US as the top world power for decades, or would we still have ended up here? Israel and Palestine would likely be different, nukes wouldn't have been dropped, and maybe the Soviet union wouldn't have collapsed. I'm not a history guy, so maybe all of this is off base. Again, certainly worse things in history that if changed would have reshaped the world, but this is definitely not a small thing affecting us today.
Definitely an interesting “what if.” Hitler never coming to power would have completely reshaped the 20th century no WWII, no Holocaust, and a very different global power balance. So much of today’s world, from the US as a superpower to Israel- Palestine and nuclear politics, might have played out differently. Hard to say exactly, but it’s definitely one of those pivotal moments in history.
If Trump didn't have a playbook I wonder if he could have accomplished the same tyranny he has.
I'm in the US Virgin islands at the moment on a trip, and I had a good conversation with a taxi driver. Tourism is way down and they are all just as disgusted and feel just as helpless as the rest of us. It's still a US territory, but anecdotally his shit is flinging on everyone.
Trump is a symptom of the late-stage imperialist system the US Empire is in, not a unique figure dramatically changing the course of history.
Yeah, even without a playbook it’s wild how much influence he’s had. Sounds rough in the Virgin Islands too crazy how his actions ripple everywhere, even in territories most people barely think about.
It's unfortunate and I'm embarrassed by my fellow countrymen. The US certainly has not often been on the right side of history, but in the here and now, I'm truly disgusted by it all.
My guy, many of the Hitler policies was inspired by the southern US policies against the black population. Sometimes I wonder the nazi rise and fall didn't prevent something like that happening in the US in the XX century.
I don't remember the details, but wasn't there a massive genetic bottleneck event in early (modern?) human prehistory?
Could be fun if it didn't happen and we were more genetically diverse!
Last time I heard about it, it was being reviewed cause the genetic diversity in Africa is too high to support that claim. The bottleneck may be related only to a part of the human population.
Ah well, good to hear that at least, and never mind then.
Last time I heard about it, it was being reviewed cause the genetic diversity in Africa is too high to support that claim. The bottleneck may be related only to a part of the human population.
well, theres also the argument that other species of genus homo gave us more genetic diversity after that event
Me going to band practice last week and getting sick.
Any further back and the unintended consequences would be too detrimental
Most sensible answer yet (maybe not the most exciting one though ;) )
Sorry you got sick!
The expansion of Europe's reach over the world in the 1500s and 1600s. Or at least the transatlantic slave trade. I would not exist, but a LOT of suffering would be prevented.
There's a book called The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson that kind of explores this idea. It's an alternate history book where the black death kills 99% of the European population instead of about a third, and the world progresses essentially without any European people. It's really good!
The Yankees winning their revolutionary war.
Yep, the Yankees somehow pulled it off shook up the whole world in the process.
The evolution of australopithecus. No humans whatsoever.
Yeah, just Australopithecus doing their thing humans weren’t even on the scene yet.
I do wonder what might have come of humanity's endeavours in medicine and science generally sans the industrial revolution
The extinction of the Neanderthals, or any of the other extinct human-like species. It'd be so fascinating to live in a world where there was another species that was close to us in intelligence but also so different. We'd be awful to them though.
The unification of the Italian peninsula by Rome. Because fuck the Roman Empire and fuck imperialism. (Also most of what you think you hate about Christianity is stuff the early Christians inherited from Roman culture).
Honestly, Rome’s unification caused more harm than good. Imperialism screwed over countless people, and a lot of the “problems” people blame on early Christianity are really just Roman cultural baggage.
If we had won the emu war, or it never happened in the first place and we came to a diplomatic solution.
Truly the timeline where humanity proves it can solve even its greatest conflicts peacefully even with emus.
I'd make sure Thomas Edison's parents never met.
Imperialism, but I don't know who to stop, make Europeans contract a virus from the Americas, and not the other way around maybe
that or everything relating to the second world war, which would maybe have been averted if there was no christian conquest
where do you even start?
David Bowie’s death.
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