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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.
Failure of the German revolution. Because that has fucked us for 100 years.
Yeah, the German Revolution’s failure really set the stage for a century of chaos.
The time Capitalism was invented by John Capital
Ah yes, the legendary John Capital strikes again giving the world capitalism, whether we asked for it or not.
The collapse of the Soviet Union
Yeah, the collapse of the Soviet Union really reshaped the whole global order.
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.
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.
Sino-Soviet split
The Sino-Soviet split really changed the dynamics of the Cold War two communist powers, but not exactly on the same page
I'd erase the bronze age collapse, my imagination runs wild thinking about what could have been if the development of civilization had continued unbroken.
Same here the Bronze Age collapse feels like one of those massive reset points. It’s wild to imagine how far civilization might’ve advanced if that momentum hadn’t been lost.
Imagine, human civilization might have been a thousand years ahead in mathematics, who knows, the mind boggles.
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.
I think we learn from our mistakes , but only for a short time. And then we repeat them again. Seems to take about 70 years or roughly the time period for most of the population to be replaced with people who never saw the reality of that history.
The whole world was moving towards fascism when Hitler came. That's why he was able to run with it.
If not him, someone else. If not Germany. Somewhere else. Fascism is inevitable when we don't teach history properly.
Unfortunately the decision makers / lawmakers are a slimy bunch that are good at propaganda.
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.
Too damn many to just pick one single thing. So I'd go safe and erase our beginning itself. That should do it.
Yeah, deleting the beginning seems like the safest move it should clear things up
...until we'd re-emerge 🤷♂️
Yeah, just a matter of time before we’d surface again
"Did you try erasing everything from the beginning and letting it reemerge again?"
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.
9/11
I would've wanted to see what America today would become if that hadn't happened. America had built up a lot of its reputation off the back of WW2 and was seen still as a good ally. George W Bush would not have become president for a second term because of how bad he was in office. American citizens would not be subjected to governmental survelliance to the extent it was after 9/11. And we wouldn't have a recession that cratered the economy.
The US Empire grew to imperial dominance post-WWII. It was seen as a good ally only to the west. 9/11 was the excuse, not the cause of the empire's genocide in Iraq and subsequent plunder, and the recession wasn't caused by 9/11 either, but was a natural element of capitalism's regular boom/bust cycle.
With or without 9/11, the US Empire would still be a gradually dying empire hated by the world.
America had already spent half a century brutalizing and terrorizing the global South exactly as it did to Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea that they were seen as good is pure revisionism
Me going to band practice last week and getting sick.
Any further back and the unintended consequences would be too detrimental
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 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.
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).
The Yankees winning their revolutionary war.
Yep, the Yankees somehow pulled it off shook up the whole world in the process.
If we had won the emu war, or it never happened in the first place and we came to a diplomatic solution.
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?
I sometimes wonder if a different outcome of the confrontation at Tours would have set back Western Europe to the point where the scope of the Crusades and the colonization of the New World would be curtailed.
I do wonder what might have come of humanity's endeavours in medicine and science generally sans the industrial revolution
I'd make sure Thomas Edison's parents never met.
David Bowie’s death.