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.
Europe?
David Bowie’s death.
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.
Which I believe would then create a paradox, because who’s going to stop the transatlantic slave trade if you don’t exist?
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Failure of the German revolution. Because that has fucked us for 100 years.
a germany under liebknecht and luxemburg… one can dream
Yeah, the German Revolution’s failure really set the stage for a century of chaos.
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.
The collapse of the Soviet Union
Yeah, the collapse of the Soviet Union really reshaped the whole global order.
The time Capitalism was invented by John Capital
There were no individual that invented capitalism. However, the closest individual that likely is the perpetrator to modern stage capitalism is a scottish philosopher Adam Smith.
So, I would say him.
I’d also include Henry Ford, who pushed for the idea of 40 hour work weeks and 5 days a week.
Adam Smith was a political economist examining capitalism (and made several errors along the way that Marx corrected, such as utterly confusing fixed vs. circulating capital). Ford also only “pushed” for 40 hour, 5 day work weeks because worker organizing was fighting for it.
The creation of capitalism wasn’t from an idea about a new system, but from the rise of inventions like the steam engine and industrial production leading to commodity production becoming the basis of production and distribution, as compared to more agrarian production and small manufacturers.
Ah yes, the legendary John Capital strikes again giving the world capitalism, whether we asked for it or not.
