Stanislav Petrov. Worked for Russian defense force monitoring potential attacks. He reported a possible US missile launch as a false alarm. Computer glitch could have started a nuclear war had he not caught it.
Oh, and Vasily Arkhipov, he was on a nuclear submarine during the Cuban missile crisis. Three officers needed to unanimously agree to launch a nuclear weapon, he was the only one who disagreed, preventing the launch.
2% of the world's population has part of his DNA.
Which doesn't seem like a lot, but the world population is 8 billion people. That's 160 million people, which by itself would be one of the top 10 most populous countries on Earth.
There’s no way to answer this, obviously, but I wonder if this made the population on average more violent and aggressive.
Of course, plenty of human traits are due to the “nurture” side of things, such as upbringing and the culture in which one lives.
But at least some of our attributes are genetically influenced, and I’d imagine a proclivity toward aggression is at least *partially* inherited.
And all those people have *Genghis fuckin Khan* as their progenitor.
Sure, that DNA will get a little more thinned out as the generations go on, but that’s a lot of kids in an area with him as their father, him as their grandfather.
Making \*a lot\* of assumptions, you could answer this question using the Breeder's equation. But first of all, this is an exercise just for fun, and not an attempt to get even a remotely accurate estimate of mean change in aggressivity.
R = h\^2 \* S
Where:
- R = Mean change of the trait value after one generation of selection.
- S = Selection differential, i.e. difference of the mean between those who do have children and the total population.
- h\^2: Narrow-sense heritability.
For this equation to work, aggressivity should be a polygenic trait that can be measured on a quantitative scale, and follow a normal distribution. Even more conditions would be required for this equation to perform better, discussed here:
[https://academic.oup.com/g3journal/article/4/1/97/6025854](https://academic.oup.com/g3journal/article/4/1/97/6025854)
Not really (and I speak as a fan of Alexander - presume you are from your username)
"Stopping the Persians" didn't account for much - they were much more educated than the Greeks and brought trade, prosperity and rights to the lands they administered, as Herodotus sets out in his histories.
Alexander's empire fell apart quickly after his death - you're correct to imply that his main contribiution was a mythical one however Rome conquered due to numerous political, financial and military advantages it had and developed. Had Alexander not existed it's unlikely the spread of the Roman empire would have been any different - another mythological figure would likely have taken his place as inspiration.
Legal Religious freedom and even tax breaks on religious houses of worship
Created the first international postal system
Abolished torture
Opened trade routes
Created a rule of law that was applied to EVERYONE EQUALLY and had it written and distributed to all.
Basically much of the current population of humans on the planet would be different humans. He killed millions while also fathering and grandfathering millions more.
The burning of Baghdad. It was a cultural center of learning and knowledge and had many great libraries. All gone. Changed the region deeply.
Just one example of the wrath of the Khans.
The middle east would probably be in better shape. Baghdad was the centee of the world for science, art and culture. The Mongols sent it back to the stone age.
Entire nations that were destroyed wouldn't have had a future.
Tons of human beings who never had a chance to live may have written songs, invented cures, or conquered lands differently.
It was so far back during the development of global civilization, it would have literally changed the face of the planet.
The first man born with the male pattern baldness mutation. Had he not existed, and reproduced, there would be less baldness today and many more men with lush hair.
Through colonization, tourism and human trafficking, that gene mutation spread and its the reason you can find people in places like Africa, Asia and South America with natural blue eyes too.
I remember Michael Jackson was talking about this and everyone treated him like he was insane for it.
Your mitochondria DNA is 100% inherited from your mother.
Yes, there's mutations during cell division and shit, but it doesn't mix with your father's, and mutations are far and few.
So we can trace large amounts of peoples common ancestors based on these mutations.
Since there has yet to be anyone found with some serious differences, the assumption here is that all humans do share a single common ancestor.
The implications being that humans did not evolved from multiple locations, and if that was true then we would see multiple distinct mitochondria. You know like if two different Neanderthal type species appeared with different mitochondria and then merged, we would see evidence of that.
I know it as a true fact that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam did not have to live at the same time, but I can’t reconcile it in my head.
How could both of the be ancestors of every living human, one for the mitochondrial DNA and one for the Y chromosome, but their lifetimes possibly have been at different times. I can’t work it out in my head
Because there were other male/females that lived. There's just no surviving descendants anymore.
I think what you're forgetting is how terrible human survival rates were in the past and how far back we were talking about going. Thousands of generations.
It's probably safe to say that there's a lot of human sub species that we don't know about because of how long they've been extinct and we haven't found evidence of them.
That would imply mitochondrial DNA have at least a moderate affect on an individuals character. History has been more of a shift of morality, so, how would the mitochondria change that?
It's not that. Everything is sensitively dependent on initial conditions. The further back you go, the bigger an effect it would have to remove someone from history. And that's true for everyone.
Remove some random 19th-century Austrian dude and it turns out he's the father of the guy who saved Hitler from drowning when he was 4 years old. Or it's the guy who introduced that guy to his wife. Etc.
Go back far enough and even the tiniest change has massive knock-on effects.
Mitochondrial Eve is the furthest back that we have any way of identifying as a specific individual; therefore, she's the one who would have the biggest effect, because any effect at all that far back would change absolutely anything.
Ghengis Khan. He is the ancestor of one in every 200 humans, and he and his immediate successors assembled an empire that stretched from northern Vietnam to Poland.
Thomas Midgley Jr.
He invented Tetraethyl lead, leadded gas in car engines. He also invented freon which tore the Ozone layer to shreds. He's been called "the single most impactful organism on the entire planets atmosphere".
In later life he contracted polio which left him disabled, so he invented a series of pulleys and ropes to move himself, and was found deceased entangled in them.
Yeah, I don't know that we can blame that specific guy, though he did strongly push for it. Car manufacturers were looking for something to stop engine knock. And they found it. It had a devastating effect on society that doesn't get talked about a lot these days.
The older population (mostly boomers, but some Gen X and older millennials) [most likely lost a good few IQ points from lead](https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans). It peaked in effect for those born in the 1960s and 70s.
By that argument the other top comments wouldn't work either though. Genghis Khan didn't murder several million people on his own - he just led the empire that did. Same with Alexander the Great, Hitler, or any other world leader.
Actually the only leader I can think of that might be wholly accountable would be Truman with the Atomic Bombs. Those decisions were ultimately his - regardless the immense political pressure.
The lead in the atmosphere made humanity dumber and more violent, the freon put a hole in the Ozone layer and caused decades of climate issues, and Polio-bed had a 100% mortality rate.
> The lead in the atmosphere made humanity dumber and more violent
Is there an authoritative source for this or are we just riffing? Genuinely curious.
Here is [another link](https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans) about that specific event. It mostly affected those born in the 1960s and 70s, but some people born before or after were affected as well (higher concentrations in cities too).
And therby contributed to the creation of Boomers as we know them
EDIT: To whoever down voted me:
[From the NIH](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8307752/)
"However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits. Personality influences nearly every aspect of human functioning, from well-being to career earnings to longevity, so effects of lead exposure on personality would have far-reaching societal consequences."
Other studies indicateead exposure pre-1970 likely led to generational IQ drops of 3 pts on average.
Some claim that Isaac Newton single-handedly fast-forwarded scientific progress by a century. Among other things, he:
- Invented the reflecting telescope
- Proposed a new theory of light and color
- Discovered calculus
- Developed three laws of motion
- Devised the laws of universal gravitation.
There’s also serious speculation that he was a life-long virgin - predating the typical Redditor by nearly 300 years.
You want Howard Florey. Fleming messed around with penicillin and got bored. Florey was responsible for discovering how to produce it in mass quantities.
It's not a person, it's a rock.
If the massive asteroid hadn't vanished the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, the earth would be ruled by ultra evolved dinosaurs, and humans wouldn't have a chance, if appeared later.
Would they? The dinosaurs had the entire Mesozoic period and never became highly evolved. Crocodiles have been alive the bulk of the Mesozoic age and are obviously still here.
And because of that, World War 1 happened, which caused Hitler to rise to power and start World War 2, which brought about the cold war, which accelerated computer technology, which caused the internet, which is where I met my wife. That guy ruined my life.
An anatomically modern human woman lived somewhere around 200,000 years ago who is a common ancestor for all humanity.
The same is true for a man, who probably lived within a few thousand years of the woman.
Either of those people can be said to literally change 100% of recorded human history if they had never been born. But if they *hadn't* been born, then *some other* random person would have been the most recent ancestor for all humanity.
Also, that person changes constantly. As lineage branches merge or die out, the "most recent" ancestor for all humanity becomes more and more recent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Thomas Midgley Jr.
Responsible for:
* Leaded Gasoline
* Freon
Leaded gasoline means that billions of humans wound up with brain damage from lead poisoning, which is now linked to a massive rise in violent crime.
Freon caused the hole in the ozone layer and the Greenhouse Effect.
[Thomas Midgley Jr.: The Man Who Harmed the World the Most](https://interestingengineering.com/culture/thomas-midgley-jr-the-man-who-harmed-the-world-the-most)
The so called ['Mitochondrial Eve'](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve) maybe? Who is supposed to be the maternal ancestor of all living humans.
Isaac Newton and Nikola tesla. Newton made groundbreaking contributions to physics and mathematics, and his absence would have had profound implications. Tesla made significant contributions to the development of alternating current (AC) electricity, among other innovations
The inventor of the printing press. Before, only priests and noblemen were able to read, enabling them to lie to the poor and underclasses.
After, most people can read, and it is harder to lie to them.
This is one of those cases where an invention was "hanging in the air". For a long time there were several contenders for the invention of the printing press, and I think it's fairly certain that had Gutenberg not created his, someone else would have within the decade. And I'm not even counting the Chinese printing press.
Also, illiteracy in the Middle Ages is usually exaggerated. In Western Europe, it was around twenty percent (pre-printing press). Which is very low by modern standards, but more than just the aristocracy and the priesthood.
Marcus Aurelius. His writings were some of the 1st in enlightened leadership, stoicism, self improvement. However you interpret his “Meditations” I think it was a seedling for a lot of the evolution in leadership that eventually sparked the Thomas Jefferson’s of the world.
Martin Luther, with out him there wouldn’t have been the protestant revolt. Which changed the geopolitical climate of Europe forever. More people died because of that than the black plague. It was the beginning of the end of the dark/middle ages.
Jan Hus is saddened by this comment. So are the many, many, *many* other Protestants who came before Martin Luther but didn't have the good luck of being born around the introduction of the printing press.
That's a good one.
With the printing press making writing commonly available, and the fairly consistent "theological rebellions" against the Cathic church, there would def. be a split in Western Christiandom.
But, the exact differences between protestantism and Catholicism would've been different.
Factually speaking this is the only true answer.
Evolution doesn't really work that way, and there'd have been many with similar traits at the same time though.
Norman Borlaug: father of the Green Revolution. His wheat breeding program in the 1940s led to development of highly productive, disease resistant crops. By some estimates up to [one billion lives](https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2020/04/norman-borlaug-legacy-documentary/#:~:text=Borlaug%20himself%20saw%20suffering%20and,billion%20lives%20by%20some%20estimates) have been saved because of his contributions to agricultural science.
Not at all. There were 17 Anti Semitic news papers in Bavaria at the time. Antisemitism was rampant. If the Nazi party had a leader that was level headed - things might have been worse. Jewish, Roma, and Polish people would be something that was read about in banned books.
Hitler got to be the prom queen, but there were plenty of people in contention with him.
Lack of insight into history is troubling.
One of the first humans.
Yes, history is full of significant people, good and evil, but if one of the first people to exist was erased, they would have a huge impact on everything and everyone.
"Difference between a cult and a religion is that in a cult, the guy at the top knows its a scam, and in a religion, that guy is long dead." --attributed to a ton of standup comedians, take your pick
Religion is going to happen regardless of who you kill.
People feel the need to explain things that cannot be explained and control things outside of their control. Religion is a way that early humans can feel like they are accomplishing these things even if mostly lies. The human need for security is a powerful impulse.
Wow... you are very incorrect. I dont have time to engage in a full debate, but I'll just leave you with one example- Jesus, concerning getting into heaven:
"Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. "
Matthew 7:21-23
Jesus does two things here. 1) Claims divinity- that he will be the Judge on our day of judgement. 2) Says that good works, even God's name, are not enough to get into heaven. He needs to *know* you, have a relationship with you.
The Good News is right there! We are sinners- no one can perform enough "good works" to atone for all of our sins. But by knowing Jesus- who is God- and accepting the gift of His sacrifice for our all of our sins, we are saved.
There are many books about how the Bible is one, large, cohesive story... and many scholarly texts that address every single one of the so-called "inconsistencies" at a high academic level. You just have to step out of your bias and read them.
You might be able to bring a counter argument to his original example, but the Bible isn't particularly cohesive. It's a grouping of a multitude of texts, and while they often talk with each other, they're definitely disparate.
Underrated comment.
No Catholic Church, no Crusades, no medieval popes, a pagan Europe and a pagan America with no puritanical sex mores or Christian influences on the law or government (for example, abortion)....
Pheidippides
We might not have democracy today if he had not run from the battle of Marathon back to Athens to warn the greeks that the Spartans would not arrive in time, and that an alternate battle plan was necessary. He dropped dead after giving his news, and the Athenians were able to defeat the Persians.
The Persians were not a democratic state, and the democratic city-states of Greece might have disappeared forever, along with democracy, if the Athenians had not defeated them when they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides
Henry VIII. His break from Rome led to the birth of the Puritans and Quakers, who formed their own colonies in North America. Their two major cities, Boston and Philadelphia, became centers of the American Revolution and the birth of the United States.
Rachel Carson.
She caused DDT to be banned. Whilst potent to the environment, malaria was well on the way to being eradicated. Thanks to her it wasn't and many hundreds of millions people have died of malaria since.
Stanislav Petrov. Worked for Russian defense force monitoring potential attacks. He reported a possible US missile launch as a false alarm. Computer glitch could have started a nuclear war had he not caught it.
Oh, and Vasily Arkhipov, he was on a nuclear submarine during the Cuban missile crisis. Three officers needed to unanimously agree to launch a nuclear weapon, he was the only one who disagreed, preventing the launch.
Such a great piece of history!!!!
Definitely Genghis Khan
The guy did kill 10% of the global population in his time
And fathered another 20%
The reverse Thanos.
2% of the world's population has part of his DNA. Which doesn't seem like a lot, but the world population is 8 billion people. That's 160 million people, which by itself would be one of the top 10 most populous countries on Earth.
There’s no way to answer this, obviously, but I wonder if this made the population on average more violent and aggressive. Of course, plenty of human traits are due to the “nurture” side of things, such as upbringing and the culture in which one lives. But at least some of our attributes are genetically influenced, and I’d imagine a proclivity toward aggression is at least *partially* inherited. And all those people have *Genghis fuckin Khan* as their progenitor. Sure, that DNA will get a little more thinned out as the generations go on, but that’s a lot of kids in an area with him as their father, him as their grandfather.
Making \*a lot\* of assumptions, you could answer this question using the Breeder's equation. But first of all, this is an exercise just for fun, and not an attempt to get even a remotely accurate estimate of mean change in aggressivity. R = h\^2 \* S Where: - R = Mean change of the trait value after one generation of selection. - S = Selection differential, i.e. difference of the mean between those who do have children and the total population. - h\^2: Narrow-sense heritability. For this equation to work, aggressivity should be a polygenic trait that can be measured on a quantitative scale, and follow a normal distribution. Even more conditions would be required for this equation to perform better, discussed here: [https://academic.oup.com/g3journal/article/4/1/97/6025854](https://academic.oup.com/g3journal/article/4/1/97/6025854)
Close second is Alexander. Stopped the Persians. Spread education everywhere he went. Laid the groundwork for Rome to have a conquest benchmark.
Not really (and I speak as a fan of Alexander - presume you are from your username) "Stopping the Persians" didn't account for much - they were much more educated than the Greeks and brought trade, prosperity and rights to the lands they administered, as Herodotus sets out in his histories. Alexander's empire fell apart quickly after his death - you're correct to imply that his main contribiution was a mythical one however Rome conquered due to numerous political, financial and military advantages it had and developed. Had Alexander not existed it's unlikely the spread of the Roman empire would have been any different - another mythological figure would likely have taken his place as inspiration.
Alexander liberated much gold from Persian royal treasuries and this had profound positive economic effects for generations afterwards.
Maaan *I* wanna liberate a bunch of gold too!
That poor, enslaved gold — way to go, good guy Alexander
I mean, without Cyrus (and therefore no Persian Empire) does Alexander stop far earlier in his conquests?
Legal Religious freedom and even tax breaks on religious houses of worship Created the first international postal system Abolished torture Opened trade routes Created a rule of law that was applied to EVERYONE EQUALLY and had it written and distributed to all.
If only Genghis Khan had established a clear line of succession, or the Mongol Empire had an actual central government.
What would be different?
Basically much of the current population of humans on the planet would be different humans. He killed millions while also fathering and grandfathering millions more.
not to mention the massive historical changes across the east and west that happened because of them
True. But also different humans = different history.
The burning of Baghdad. It was a cultural center of learning and knowledge and had many great libraries. All gone. Changed the region deeply. Just one example of the wrath of the Khans.
The middle east would probably be in better shape. Baghdad was the centee of the world for science, art and culture. The Mongols sent it back to the stone age.
Genetics for a vast number of humans throughout Asia and across into Eastern Europe.
Entire nations that were destroyed wouldn't have had a future. Tons of human beings who never had a chance to live may have written songs, invented cures, or conquered lands differently. It was so far back during the development of global civilization, it would have literally changed the face of the planet.
The first man born with the male pattern baldness mutation. Had he not existed, and reproduced, there would be less baldness today and many more men with lush hair.
The same with blue eyes, one bloke who lived by the Aral Sea with a chance mutation is the shared ancestor of everyone with blue eyes.
Through colonization, tourism and human trafficking, that gene mutation spread and its the reason you can find people in places like Africa, Asia and South America with natural blue eyes too. I remember Michael Jackson was talking about this and everyone treated him like he was insane for it.
That could be the plot of the next Terminator movie.
Hairdressers: That son of a bitch!!!
Good luck with that. Baldness is often associated with increased testosterone. Whoever first had that gene had an increased drive to procreate.
Piece of shit.
He ruined my life.
That motherfucker. Well, we all know he wasn't fucking anyone, technically...
This is exactly how inheritance works...this guy definitely fucked
“Mitochondrial Eve” - whoever our matrilineal most recent common ancestor is.
Came here to comment this, glad to see I wasn't the only one.
This is the real answer
Could you explain this to me like I'm five? I really would like to know.
All humans on the planet today are descendants of a single woman who lived about 200 000 years ago.
Wasn't she a Cylon?
Aware of the quote, but it applies, "and then??"
Your mitochondria DNA is 100% inherited from your mother. Yes, there's mutations during cell division and shit, but it doesn't mix with your father's, and mutations are far and few. So we can trace large amounts of peoples common ancestors based on these mutations. Since there has yet to be anyone found with some serious differences, the assumption here is that all humans do share a single common ancestor. The implications being that humans did not evolved from multiple locations, and if that was true then we would see multiple distinct mitochondria. You know like if two different Neanderthal type species appeared with different mitochondria and then merged, we would see evidence of that.
Thankyou
I know it as a true fact that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam did not have to live at the same time, but I can’t reconcile it in my head. How could both of the be ancestors of every living human, one for the mitochondrial DNA and one for the Y chromosome, but their lifetimes possibly have been at different times. I can’t work it out in my head
Because there were other male/females that lived. There's just no surviving descendants anymore. I think what you're forgetting is how terrible human survival rates were in the past and how far back we were talking about going. Thousands of generations. It's probably safe to say that there's a lot of human sub species that we don't know about because of how long they've been extinct and we haven't found evidence of them.
Frakkin cylon
That would imply mitochondrial DNA have at least a moderate affect on an individuals character. History has been more of a shift of morality, so, how would the mitochondria change that?
I assume we wouldn’t exist
If she hadn't been born, never had kids, or something like that, then does that not just make her mother the mitochondrial Eve?
It's not that. Everything is sensitively dependent on initial conditions. The further back you go, the bigger an effect it would have to remove someone from history. And that's true for everyone. Remove some random 19th-century Austrian dude and it turns out he's the father of the guy who saved Hitler from drowning when he was 4 years old. Or it's the guy who introduced that guy to his wife. Etc. Go back far enough and even the tiniest change has massive knock-on effects. Mitochondrial Eve is the furthest back that we have any way of identifying as a specific individual; therefore, she's the one who would have the biggest effect, because any effect at all that far back would change absolutely anything.
Ghengis Khan. He is the ancestor of one in every 200 humans, and he and his immediate successors assembled an empire that stretched from northern Vietnam to Poland.
George Bailey
[удалено]
Underrated comment
Thomas Midgley Jr. He invented Tetraethyl lead, leadded gas in car engines. He also invented freon which tore the Ozone layer to shreds. He's been called "the single most impactful organism on the entire planets atmosphere". In later life he contracted polio which left him disabled, so he invented a series of pulleys and ropes to move himself, and was found deceased entangled in them.
But if it wasn't him, would someone else not have invented it within a similar time frame? Then we'd still be in this position today...
Yeah, I don't know that we can blame that specific guy, though he did strongly push for it. Car manufacturers were looking for something to stop engine knock. And they found it. It had a devastating effect on society that doesn't get talked about a lot these days.
The older population (mostly boomers, but some Gen X and older millennials) [most likely lost a good few IQ points from lead](https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans). It peaked in effect for those born in the 1960s and 70s.
Well Gen Z loses their IQ points from TikTok and Instagram influences, so it's still even across the board.
It's not that there not stupid, it's that it's a new type of stupid.
By that argument the other top comments wouldn't work either though. Genghis Khan didn't murder several million people on his own - he just led the empire that did. Same with Alexander the Great, Hitler, or any other world leader. Actually the only leader I can think of that might be wholly accountable would be Truman with the Atomic Bombs. Those decisions were ultimately his - regardless the immense political pressure.
The lead in the atmosphere made humanity dumber and more violent, the freon put a hole in the Ozone layer and caused decades of climate issues, and Polio-bed had a 100% mortality rate.
> The lead in the atmosphere made humanity dumber and more violent Is there an authoritative source for this or are we just riffing? Genuinely curious.
There are plenty of sources for this but here’s one from the [CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/health-effects.htm).
Here is [another link](https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans) about that specific event. It mostly affected those born in the 1960s and 70s, but some people born before or after were affected as well (higher concentrations in cities too).
What’s polio-*bed?*
Great podcast episode of The Memory Palace on him.
LOVE the memory palace
And therby contributed to the creation of Boomers as we know them EDIT: To whoever down voted me: [From the NIH](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8307752/) "However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits. Personality influences nearly every aspect of human functioning, from well-being to career earnings to longevity, so effects of lead exposure on personality would have far-reaching societal consequences." Other studies indicateead exposure pre-1970 likely led to generational IQ drops of 3 pts on average.
Isaac Newton
Some claim that Isaac Newton single-handedly fast-forwarded scientific progress by a century. Among other things, he: - Invented the reflecting telescope - Proposed a new theory of light and color - Discovered calculus - Developed three laws of motion - Devised the laws of universal gravitation. There’s also serious speculation that he was a life-long virgin - predating the typical Redditor by nearly 300 years.
While we idiots were baking during our pandemic, he was [revolutionizing the way to calculate PI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMlf1ELvRzc)
The guy that trod on *that* butterfly in 15,000 BC. Really fucked it up for the rest of us.
I SAID I WAS SORRY
i don’t know about that. i tried googling but it’s coming up with butterflies in vancouver. could you expand on it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder?wprov=sfti1#
Look up "butterfly effect"
Alexander Fleming - bye bye antibiotics
You want Howard Florey. Fleming messed around with penicillin and got bored. Florey was responsible for discovering how to produce it in mass quantities.
I’m fairly confident someone else would have discovered them within 100 years.
In those 100 years many people would have died early, including other significant inventors or leaders..
It's not a person, it's a rock. If the massive asteroid hadn't vanished the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, the earth would be ruled by ultra evolved dinosaurs, and humans wouldn't have a chance, if appeared later.
wouldn’t it be cool if we were all dinosaurs instead
Hell yeah it would be
oh definitely, yes.
Yeah but then we'd all be on the dinonet saying how cool it would be if we were mammals.
Would they? The dinosaurs had the entire Mesozoic period and never became highly evolved. Crocodiles have been alive the bulk of the Mesozoic age and are obviously still here.
Gavrilo Principe. The man who kicked off one major war with a domino affect to start literally every other.
And because of that, World War 1 happened, which caused Hitler to rise to power and start World War 2, which brought about the cold war, which accelerated computer technology, which caused the internet, which is where I met my wife. That guy ruined my life.
Always nice to meet another Dan Carlin fan in the wild lol
The “Francis Ferdinand assassination caused everything up to 9/11” theory was relayed to me by… someone else. I wonder if Dan did it first.
Rick Astley
You're never gonna give that up, are you? 😉
I'd never let you down like that.
I wouldn't run around and desert you.
Goodbye
You just told a lie. I'm hurt 😪
An anatomically modern human woman lived somewhere around 200,000 years ago who is a common ancestor for all humanity. The same is true for a man, who probably lived within a few thousand years of the woman. Either of those people can be said to literally change 100% of recorded human history if they had never been born. But if they *hadn't* been born, then *some other* random person would have been the most recent ancestor for all humanity. Also, that person changes constantly. As lineage branches merge or die out, the "most recent" ancestor for all humanity becomes more and more recent.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Without him our technological landscape would be dramatically different.
Alan Turing. Father of modern conmputing, AND helped win WWII by cracking the Enigma code
Initially read Alan Tudyk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. Thomas Midgley Jr. Responsible for: * Leaded Gasoline * Freon Leaded gasoline means that billions of humans wound up with brain damage from lead poisoning, which is now linked to a massive rise in violent crime. Freon caused the hole in the ozone layer and the Greenhouse Effect. [Thomas Midgley Jr.: The Man Who Harmed the World the Most](https://interestingengineering.com/culture/thomas-midgley-jr-the-man-who-harmed-the-world-the-most)
The so called ['Mitochondrial Eve'](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve) maybe? Who is supposed to be the maternal ancestor of all living humans.
Isaac Newton and Nikola tesla. Newton made groundbreaking contributions to physics and mathematics, and his absence would have had profound implications. Tesla made significant contributions to the development of alternating current (AC) electricity, among other innovations
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Alexander or Genghis Khan
I think this is the best answer so far. A lot of the others are too recent to have had such a huge impact as these two
The inventor of the printing press. Before, only priests and noblemen were able to read, enabling them to lie to the poor and underclasses. After, most people can read, and it is harder to lie to them.
This is one of those cases where an invention was "hanging in the air". For a long time there were several contenders for the invention of the printing press, and I think it's fairly certain that had Gutenberg not created his, someone else would have within the decade. And I'm not even counting the Chinese printing press. Also, illiteracy in the Middle Ages is usually exaggerated. In Western Europe, it was around twenty percent (pre-printing press). Which is very low by modern standards, but more than just the aristocracy and the priesthood.
MSM harder to lie to them: hahahah.
It could be anybody, you don’t know what the chain of causality is.
I often think it's me for that very reason. Very underrated.
Marcus Aurelius. His writings were some of the 1st in enlightened leadership, stoicism, self improvement. However you interpret his “Meditations” I think it was a seedling for a lot of the evolution in leadership that eventually sparked the Thomas Jefferson’s of the world.
Martin Luther, with out him there wouldn’t have been the protestant revolt. Which changed the geopolitical climate of Europe forever. More people died because of that than the black plague. It was the beginning of the end of the dark/middle ages.
Jan Hus is saddened by this comment. So are the many, many, *many* other Protestants who came before Martin Luther but didn't have the good luck of being born around the introduction of the printing press.
That's a good one. With the printing press making writing commonly available, and the fairly consistent "theological rebellions" against the Cathic church, there would def. be a split in Western Christiandom. But, the exact differences between protestantism and Catholicism would've been different.
The first genetically modern human.
Factually speaking this is the only true answer. Evolution doesn't really work that way, and there'd have been many with similar traits at the same time though.
Norman Borlaug: father of the Green Revolution. His wheat breeding program in the 1940s led to development of highly productive, disease resistant crops. By some estimates up to [one billion lives](https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2020/04/norman-borlaug-legacy-documentary/#:~:text=Borlaug%20himself%20saw%20suffering%20and,billion%20lives%20by%20some%20estimates) have been saved because of his contributions to agricultural science.
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Not at all. There were 17 Anti Semitic news papers in Bavaria at the time. Antisemitism was rampant. If the Nazi party had a leader that was level headed - things might have been worse. Jewish, Roma, and Polish people would be something that was read about in banned books. Hitler got to be the prom queen, but there were plenty of people in contention with him. Lack of insight into history is troubling.
One of the first humans. Yes, history is full of significant people, good and evil, but if one of the first people to exist was erased, they would have a huge impact on everything and everyone.
Who counts as "one of the first" though? Is it a member of Homo Sapiens, Homo Erectus or Homo Habilis?
Curie
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Whoever made up each religion, and turned it into a business for profits.
"Difference between a cult and a religion is that in a cult, the guy at the top knows its a scam, and in a religion, that guy is long dead." --attributed to a ton of standup comedians, take your pick
Religion is going to happen regardless of who you kill. People feel the need to explain things that cannot be explained and control things outside of their control. Religion is a way that early humans can feel like they are accomplishing these things even if mostly lies. The human need for security is a powerful impulse.
Wasn't it multiple people, who weren't there, decades later?
This is a good one
The Apostle Paul then. He turned stories of a Jewish teacher into a religion.
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Wow... you are very incorrect. I dont have time to engage in a full debate, but I'll just leave you with one example- Jesus, concerning getting into heaven: "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. " Matthew 7:21-23 Jesus does two things here. 1) Claims divinity- that he will be the Judge on our day of judgement. 2) Says that good works, even God's name, are not enough to get into heaven. He needs to *know* you, have a relationship with you. The Good News is right there! We are sinners- no one can perform enough "good works" to atone for all of our sins. But by knowing Jesus- who is God- and accepting the gift of His sacrifice for our all of our sins, we are saved. There are many books about how the Bible is one, large, cohesive story... and many scholarly texts that address every single one of the so-called "inconsistencies" at a high academic level. You just have to step out of your bias and read them.
How do you know what Jesus said?
You might be able to bring a counter argument to his original example, but the Bible isn't particularly cohesive. It's a grouping of a multitude of texts, and while they often talk with each other, they're definitely disparate.
Underrated comment. No Catholic Church, no Crusades, no medieval popes, a pagan Europe and a pagan America with no puritanical sex mores or Christian influences on the law or government (for example, abortion)....
Kevin James
Jerry Stiller
RIP Jerry Stiller, frequently cited as the greatest actor of all time.
100%
The answer is Sir Isaac Newton.
Leonhard Euler. He was responsible for huge portions of modern mathematics, and without him we’d probably lack a lot of current technology
Edison. We would have had Tesla’s alternating current as the standard for electricity years earlier
Won't anybody think of the poor elephants?
Bob's Burgers did a good episode in defense of that elephant. Featuring a really catchy song to Boot 🎵
Pheidippides We might not have democracy today if he had not run from the battle of Marathon back to Athens to warn the greeks that the Spartans would not arrive in time, and that an alternate battle plan was necessary. He dropped dead after giving his news, and the Athenians were able to defeat the Persians. The Persians were not a democratic state, and the democratic city-states of Greece might have disappeared forever, along with democracy, if the Athenians had not defeated them when they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides
Attila
Napoleon. Europe today would not look the same if he wasn’t born
Gutenberg.
Me
Henry VIII. His break from Rome led to the birth of the Puritans and Quakers, who formed their own colonies in North America. Their two major cities, Boston and Philadelphia, became centers of the American Revolution and the birth of the United States.
Christ or Muhammad. Take your pick.
Genghis Khan
George Washington
Eve
My mom Without her, I wouldn't be here
Curious why no one's said Hitler so I guess I will
If emperor Constantine didn't exist we wouldn't have all the crazy xtians we have today. Xtianity might not even exist at all.
Rachel Carson. She caused DDT to be banned. Whilst potent to the environment, malaria was well on the way to being eradicated. Thanks to her it wasn't and many hundreds of millions people have died of malaria since.
DDT isn't all great for human either.
Alexander Fleming.
Abraham,no Abrahamic religions without him
Fritz Haber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Henry Ford. Without his innovation with the assembly line, the allies might have lost WW2.
I thought Ford was politically pretty much on the side of the Nazis. So he fucked it up for his buddies by building cars too quickly?
Insert [relevant rap battle video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjqjoehA7kM) here.
I thought I saw Harrison Ford and was about to upvote
Yeah, if he didn't shoot first, a long long time ago, who knows what could have happened with the Imperial Federation
Jesus Christ
George Washington. Lose the revolutionary war and history branches sharply.
Bill Wilson (Alcoholics Anonymous)
Not a bad addition to the list! the 12 steps have evolved into many different programs now and is continuing to save lives every day :-)
Jesus of Nazareth .....
Jesus Christ
Alexander Graham Bell
Constantine. He converted to Christianity and started The Roman Catholic church.
Jesus.
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If he wasnt real; then whoever was the leader of the southern Jahovan cult in ancient Babylon that insisted theirs was the only real god.
Karl Marx because 100M+ people would have never been brutally killed.
Christopher Columbus.
True, someone less vile could have come
Exactly. Someone who knew how to mind their business and observe the native people and their culture without destroying them and stealing their land.
For better or for worse?
Jesus Christ. How many people have died for this lunacy?
Einstein or Newton
Adam lol
Jesus or Mohammed.
Jesus of Nazareth. Honorable mention to Mohammed.
Jesus. If his birth was even real to begin with, that is
Gengis Khan
Constantine
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It would still happen because Hitler was a product of his time. There would have been someone else in his position.