[dohboi]

If you could go back and change just one particular event that happened in history, what would it be?

History here can go back before actual recorded history. You might decide to alter the development of the species Homo Sapiens, or to alter or impede our development of language, or of religion, or of fire, or of tools, or ag, or writing, or cities...

If there were one thing you could change in the vast sweep of history, what would it be, and why?

[vtsnowedin]

Rewrite the treaty of Versailles which came after WWI and oppressed Germany so severely that it led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and then WWII.
Substitute some effective Marshal plan to rebuild.

[dohboi]

Good one. I was going to mention something about the holocaust in the opening, but this gets at the deeper causes of the whole debacle.

But then would that have provided a firm footing for western civilization to move forward with full ff-powered industrialization even earlier, so that we would now be even further down the GW rabbithole (as well as a number of other negative consequences of modern industrial society)?

[Plantagenet]

I would go back in time and remove Muhammad from the timeline so Islam never got started.

Yes, Nazi Germany and 6 million killed in the Holocaust is a terrible crime, but Nazi Germany lasted less then 20 years.

In contrast Islam has been engaging in jihad and conquest and genocide and slavery and terrorism and the destruction of temples, churches, and shrines belonging to other religions for 1400 years. The death toll in India alone during the Islamic jihad there is estimated at 80 million, with many more millions being killed in jihad after jihad against Persia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Hungary, Austria etc. etc.

Cheers!


Allah Akbar!! Wait a minute....that timeline is now flickering out...........

[SeaGypsy]

My wish would be that the white buffalo medicine woman had come along about the same time as Gautmama & that the great competition of the world was for the greatest peace thereby. Delete middle eastern influence beyond sheep husbandry.

[Hawkcreek]

I believe that every human tribe or mega-tribe has had conflict and killing as a major part of its thought processes, since we first became incapable of licking our own asses.
If you are a believer in a god, that must tell you that he wants it that way. It serves a purpose in some way.
I believe we are in a virtual universe, made by and of, a creator. To me the only logical reason for all the ugly crap humans go through is for this creator to be able to experience it first hand. After all, anything beats sitting around in an empty universe contemplating nothing, doesn't it? And all that pain and death isn't really too bad if it is only happening to the one who created it to start with.
So, to get back to the question - I would change the programming of the game to allow any character who has reached a certain level, to alter the program, in some ways (while still remaining unaware that his viewpoint of the game is that of the original programmer).
If you want to have super strength, type it in. If you want to be able to breathe under water, type it in.
If you want to skip a dull section of the game, jump forward a hundred years or so.

And if I can't have that, then I want the original constitution of the United States revised to state that anyone who proposed a law to limit the already stated freedoms of the citizens, or that seems to conflict with the obvious intent, would be immediately put to death.

[sidzepp]

The Jamestown settlers in 1619 deciding that the Dutch ship that brought the Africans over was morally wrong and told them they would never purchase another human to be placed in bondage.

[vtsnowedin]

Good one. I was going to mention something about the holocaust in the opening, but this gets at the deeper causes of the whole debacle.

But then would that have provided a firm footing for western civilization to move forward with full ff-powered industrialization even earlier, so that we would now be even further down the GW rabbithole (as well as a number of other negative consequences of modern industrial society)?

You would never know. Among those millions killed were probably hundreds of gifted future scientists that would have seen and solved that problem and others before they became critical.

[vtsnowedin]

It comes down to who's side are you on and how far back you want to go. The Muslims might want to sink the basket floating the infant Moses down the Nile but if they did that they might wipe themselves out as they are probably direct descendants.

[Newfie]

Nothing. All that we are is contained within ourselves. Wipe out one baddie and another will emerge.

[Tanada]

Have someone in authority in Rome 100 AD discover or learn from the person who discovered gunpowder how to make it. The recipe is very simple and can be made almost anywhere with very low technology, the Roman Empire could have easily deployed it.

With black powder blasting their mining efficiency would go up by an order of magnitude, as would their ability to tunnel or otherwise blast for infrastructure like roads and aqueduct construction.

[Ibon]

I gave it some thought and then concluded that I would not change a single thing since this continuum of life on our planet is perfect. The pathway has been a crazy mix of quirky twists and turns influenced by meteors and volcanic farts, moving continents and advancing and receding ice sheets, land bridges crossed and speciation and extinctions folding over and kneading like dough.

When you take it all in and consider this as a symphony for the past 500 million years since the Pre Cambrian you are left with a sense of awe.

Trust in the process. What ever inflated role you give to our species in altering some grand order on our planet is bull shit.
JMHO.

[GHung]

What would I change? Jimi Hendrix didn't move on. It wouldn't change much, but nothing would beyond our obsession with fire. We're still children, playing with fire.

[Ibon]

What would I change? Jimi Hendrix didn't move on. It wouldn't change much, but nothing would beyond our obsession with fire. We're still children, playing with fire.

And down and down and down we go, sorry my darling, we musn't be late for the show.............

[dohboi]

"We're still children, playing with fire."

Nicely put. And yes, probably a lot of this crap would be a bit more tolerable to go through if we had Jimi's magic to help us through.

Ibon is presenting a philosophical position popular in the 18th century, that we are living in 'the best of all possible world's' which Voltaire satirized savagely in such works as Candide. I'm actually closer to espousing it than one might think, and I certainly don't think all of Voltaire's criticism (and mis-characterizations) of it were fair or convincing. But it fits Ibon's other positions quite well, so it's nice to see it presented so openly.

Soooo, T thinks gunpowder would have been a wonderful boon to the Roman Empire...hmmmm...

Newf takes what might be termed a Taoistic stance. (Has anyone read or seen The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin? It explores similar themes with similar (implied) conclusions.)

vt seems to think that scientists can (or probably would?) solve problems without creating new, possibly worse problems. Not an uncommon view in our culture, but one that many may find...problematic...

sidz suggests stopping that other holocaust before it began.

And besides some hard to follow gaming metaphor (?), H calls for death to all the seek to impinge freedoms. But are all freedoms equally uninfringeable? Are some people's 'freedom' not to serve people who their religiously rationalized prejudice tells them are the devils spawn an infringement on the latters' rights to said basic services?...

All fodder for good discussion.

Thanks all for humoring me in this hypothetical.

I would have steered humans away from developing language in the first place, without which we almost surely would not have been able to organize enough to engineer the un-terraforming of the earth...but then, on the other hand, we wouldn't be able to have these wonderful conversations...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdHHsoW6mMg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jbdw43yvTY

[Subjectivist]

I would bring the idea of national reserves directly into the US Constitution so that some 10-20 percent of every state would have been a nature preserve from the very beginning of the nation. If they had always existed many species like the passenger pigeon would probably not be extinct because they would gave had safe habitat to maintain a breeding population in.

Animals like the Nitny Lions of Pennsylvania are fascinating to me, and what the early settlers and homesteaders did everywhere east of the Mississippi is amazing and appalling. We went from broad forests to clear cut in almost every state. I have seen pictures from the late 1800's from lumberjacks in Michigan posing in front of huge old growth oak trees they were clear cutting. Trees that were up to a thousand years old, cut down for lumber and paper pulp and steam engine fuel. It's kind of stunning if you think about it.

[dinopello]

I would have stopped Eve from munching down on the one Apple that she wasn't supposed to touch. Maybe pick some granny smiths and bake a pie for her if she really wants a good apple treat. That way we could all still be naked and frolicking in the garden without all this religious nonsense.

[dohboi]

Good points, sub.

William Bartram describes truly enormous trees in Georgia that were all cut down. There were also 6 to 12 inches of rich black soils above the now-famous red clay, which topsoil was almost all stripped away by bad farming practices throughout much of the state.

[Outcast_Searcher]

I would have stopped Eve from munching down on the one Apple that she wasn't supposed to touch. Maybe pick some granny smiths and bake a pie for her if she really wants a good apple treat. That way we could all still be naked and frolicking in the garden without all this religious nonsense.

Good one Dino. I was thinking along those lines with a slightly different slant. (It's not religion itself that bothers me, it's what technology has wrought).

I'm an athiest. I see the story of the garden of Eden meaning essentially that once humans achieved a certain level of brain power and began to climb the technology tree, the rest (big picture) was inevitable. (The 2001 scene of Moon Watcher (the ape leader in the troop the monolith made smarter) hurling the bone (club tool) into the air and as it falls we're transported 4 million years into the future to see a space station (another tool, a bit more advanced) falling around the earth is a perfect image of this inevitability.)

So, given the way humans as an "intelligent" species behave, and the net results for the biosphere being (IMO) inevitable, I would want to prevent that climb from ever beginning, by somehow suppressing the growth of that initial intelligence.

So for the sake of the rest of the biosphere, if humans were either still basically apes with no technology or extinct, that would seem to be a far better outcome than what has occurred (and what is now baked into the future).

Maybe this is impossible -- maybe once life thrives, intelligence is inevitable given enough time. (With a sample size of one, we can only speculate). But surely destroying the biosphere as the net effect of humanity's achievements long term can't exactly be something for us to be proud of -- whether you are religious or not.

Or maybe other intelligent species manage to "wake up" and live within limits in time. Too bad humans are unlikely to survive long enough to learn and explore and find out -- even as we have proof of exoplanets apparently all over the known universe.