One day you're hanging out at home watching a movie with your best friend, and you both
feel your stomachs grumbling.
You decide to order up some food, but as you pull the delivery app up neither of you can
decide between pizza or hamburgers.
It's a real toss up, and you could honestly go for either, but at the last minute you
decide on hamburgers and place your order.
Your order is shot out to the restaurant, and a driver near the restaurant accepts the
delivery.
However, at the same time that driver accepts your delivery, another driver near the pizza
restaurant does not get a chance to accept your would-be delivery.
That driver misses out on the three dollar tip that he would have gotten from bringing
you your piping hot pizza, and a year later when he goes to apply for college to better
his life, he's unable to enroll because he's short exactly three dollars- the three dollars
he would've made on your delivery but didn't.
Twenty years later, the pizza delivery driver never got a chance to go to school and major
in political science, and a presidential election he would have been a candidate in takes place
without him, and another person becomes president of the United States.
Two years later halfway through the new president's first term, aliens from Zeti Reticuli invade
the earth, intent on harvesting delicious human brains.
The president freaks out and fails to stop the invasion, but secretly, the pizza delivery
driver who should have been president, was a strategic genius who could have saved all
of humanity.
Now, the human race is extinct, and all because you decided to get burgers instead of pizza
twenty three years ago.
History is funny, and the smallest choice can have untold consequences for future generations.
In the famous Ray Bradbury story, “A Sound of Thunder”, a time-traveling hunter inadvertently
changes the future of humanity by stepping on a simple butterfly millions of years in
the past.
In real history, the smallest changes can have equally huge consequences, and today
we're going to look at some of these critical junctions in history.
3.
Bad security guards launch World War I and save the world
Popular myth states that Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand
and launched World War I, had a hankering for a sandwich which placed him at exactly
the right time and place to murder the Archduke after his first failed attempt.
While the sandwich story is exactly that- a myth- the truth is that it was Ferdinand's
own security detail and their bad decision that led to his death, and shaped the entirety
of the 20th century.
On June 28th, 1914, the Archduke was parading through the streets of Sarajevo despite threats
against his life by Bosnian separatists.
The motorcade's route had been published well in advance in order so that more people would
be able to flock to the streets and see the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne in person.
Predictably, Bosnian terrorists tried to kill the Archduke by throwing a bomb under his
car as it passed by- but the fuse was delayed and the bomb exploded behind the Archduke's
car, injuring several of his men.
The motorcade promptly sped off, and was supposed to take a new route to avoid further attempts
on his life.
Unfortunately, nobody on the duke's security detail had bothered to tell the Czech-speaking
drivers of the change in plans, and suddenly the Czech driver of the duke's car made a
wrong turn, forcing him to stop right in front of Gavrilo Princip.
Astounded at his incredible luck, Princip took his fateful shot, killing the Archduke
and launching into motion the events that would lead to World War I.
Had anybody in the duke's security detail made the decision to inform the Czech-speaking
drivers of the new route, history as we know it would have been completely rewritten.
For starters, it's unlikely that World War I would have happened when it did.
Germany was eager to dethrone Britain as the ruling global power, but knew that it could
not afford to do so until it could match the power of her mighty fleets.
Without the assassination of the Archduke, Germany would have likely tried to further
build its military and economic might to rival Britain.
Without a defeat in World War I, Germany's Wilhelm II would have remained in power, and
Germany would have remained an imperial power.
War in Europe would have been inevitable given friction between Russian communists, Germany's
imperialists, and the democracies of Britain and France, but the war would have started
later, and without Hitler's rise to power, Einstein and the dozens of brilliant Jewish
physicists who fled Nazi rule would have likely remained in Germany and Austria.
This would have led to Germany developing the atomic bomb before the allies, which would
have been reason enough to keep the US out of a European war.
The allies would have lost the ensuing world war, and an imperialistic Germany would have
ruled Europe.
Today, the UN would not exist, and instead of a system of strong, liberal democracies
leading the world, it would have been an imperial Germany paving the future of humanity.
2.
Lazy politician dooms the Soviet Union and prevents World War III
By 1989 the simmering conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was reaching
a critical level.
President Ronald Reagan had built upon the international successes of his predecessors
and had largely isolated the Soviet Union from the rest of the world economically.
Slowly strangled by a lack of international trade, the Soviet Bloc countries were all
feeling the pinch, and bread lines were common across the Soviet Union and its communist
protectorates.
A Revolutionary fervor began to build amongst the youth, who refused to blindly swallow
the propaganda that had been spoon-fed to their parents.
The Soviet Union's leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had initiated a system of reforms to ease
economic restrictions and boost the economy of the Union and other eastern bloc nations,
yet peaceful protests had already begun to spread across eastern Europe.
In East Germany, massive protests rocked the nation as the people demanded Gorbachev-style
reforms in their own country.
In order to appease the citizenry, the government issued new travel regulations that promised
the freedom to travel outside of East Germany- although buried under the fine print, national
security exemptions promised that few if any East Germans would actually be free to leave
the country.
On November 9th, the spokesman for the east German politburo, Guenter Schabowski, held
a regularly scheduled press conference.
Earlier, he had received a document from the politburo speaking about the travel regulations
and urging him to mention them publicly, though Schabowski had not had the time to read the
document thoroughly and he had never been involved in discussions about the easing of
travel restrictions.
The press conference went on as normal and was completely uneventful, famous American
reporter Tom Brokaw described the evening as “boring”.
Towards the end however, an Italian journalist piped up with a question about the travel
regulations, and the question sparked Schabowski's memory.
Having read only brief snippets of the document he had been handed on the subject, Schabowski
mentioned things that had been purely hypothetical discussion amongst politburo members but that
stood out in his memory as significant, namely the opening of the border and free travel
for all citizens.
Immediately the room exploded into a frenzy of questions from the very surprised reporters,
with various reporters asking when the regulation would go into effect.
One reporter shouted above the din: “immediately?”.
The rattled Schabowski shuffled his papers nervously and mumbled out a response, “Immediately,
right away.”
Within minutes the international press was reporting that East Germany's borders were
open to all, and east germans watching illegal western media broadcasts, began to spread
the word amongst themselves.
Within hours thousands of East Germans had swarmed the few guards posted along the Berlin
Wall and by 11:30 that night, Germany was in effect, a reunited country.
The Berlin Wall would have ultimately fallen, and the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc was
likely to be inevitable due to a variety of factors.
Yet had Schabowski been a more competent politician, or at least a more prepared one, the unintentional
announcement of the opening of east Germany's borders would not have led to the quick reunification
of Germany that it did, and in turn spur the revolutionary wave that would ultimately defeat
European communism.
Gorbachev had promised that he would not use military power to respond to the political
uprisings that were plaguing east europe, but had East Germany's borders not been inadvertently
opened and acted as a release valve for the revolutionary fervor in eastern europe, it's
likely the frustrated revolutionaries would have resorted to violence.
Seeing his own political power fading, and the Soviet Union along with it, it is not
unlikely that Gorbachev would have resorted to military force which would have inevitably
spilled across Europe.
Dragged into an accidental war, NATO would have at last found itself in the war it dreaded
most, and in a very dangerous way as it faced off against a Soviet Union desperate and on
the verge of political collapse.
With a full-scale war in Europe and the collapse of political order in the east, control of
nuclear weapons would have fallen on generals emboldened to not seek Kremlin approval for
their use.
Faced against superior NATO forces and backed into a desperate corner, many of those generals
could have authorized the use of nuclear weapons against NATO troops, triggering a retaliatory
attack from the West.
1.
A shortage of paper sets mankind back centuries
Archimedes was a Greek genius who is well known for his accomplishments as a mathematician,
physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer.
Very little is known about his life, instead he is best known for his many contributions
to science and remembered as one of the leading scientists of ancient history.
A brilliant mind, Archimedes would stumble upon mathematical theorems which would lay
the foundation down for modern calculus.
At some point in the thirteenth century, his work on what would lead to integral calculus
was copied down in order to be preserved, but three hundred years later those parchments,
carefully safeguarded and preserved in a monastery, were discovered by an unknown monk who with
a single rash decision, set back human progress by hundreds of years.
Needing to copy down some religious texts, the monk desperately looked for fresh parchment
upon which to write on.
With no fresh paper to write on available anywhere in the monastery, the monk selected
instead a few pieces of parchment with writing he did not understand, and then began to scrape
the ink off so he could write over it.
Unknowingly, the monk was writing over texts that explained key aspects of calculus, and
in the act destroyed information that would take hundreds of years to rediscover.
How would human civilization have changed if that monk had picked literally any other
parchment to write on, or if the monk in charge of the shopping had stocked up on blank parchment?
Well, that's hard to determine, but given that calculus is used in everything from physics,
engineering, economics, statistics, and even medicine, it's clear that this anonymous monk's
very bad decision led to humanity sitting in the corner with the dunce cap on for centuries
to come.
Just think about it, mankind might have landed on the moon in the 1800s, and we could all
be enjoying Star Trek-level technology in our daily lives today!
What would the world look like today if the decisions in this episode had gone another
way?
Want to hear more about the biggest decisions that changed the world?
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