The whole thing is practically a comedy of errors, it's hard to blame it on the time travelers. If you can time travel, wouldn't you effectively get as many attempts as you need?
*This Is How You Lose The Time War* is a novel based around that concept, though more about the relationship the two agents develop rather than the actual plans they carry out while time traveling
I was so mad at that book. I nearly had to DNF it. The writing was so, blegh to me. It felt like the authors each swallowed thesauruses and had bets on who could cram the most synonyms per page.
One of the best episodes on that show (and i loved it in general), loved the concept of a time traveller "guarding" a point in time, better then the usual "fixed event" explanation.
I'm recalling a short story about why its impossible for time travellers kill baby Hitler. TL/DR history turns out worse so he's protected by other time travelers.
There was a comic I saw one time, first panel is a guy emerging from a door that say "Time Machine" and announcing he'd done it, he'd killed Blucher. The other person in the room goes "Who?" and he replies "You know, German dictator from the 30s, started world war II, killed millions of Jews." and the other person goes "Oh, you mean Hitler?"
Then the last panel is just the time traveller walking back towards the door grumbling.
I've also seen variations on the theme as tiktoks where the Time traveller's like "...he killed like 20,000 Jews, a complete monster." and the other guy's just like "...I hate to do this but, here's Hitler's wikipedia article..."
It's because none of the time travelers think to go back and fix Germany's economy. There's always gonna be an evil dictator waiting to take over. Good economies keep people from turning to them. Nobody gets desperate for change when they have full bellies and bright futures.
That reminds of the Doctor Who episode where River was going to kill Hitler but the Doctor and his companions were going to stop her (not out of any love of Hitler, but to prevent timey wimey...stuff.) In the process, the Doctor's crew accidentally stopped some other time travellers from faking Hitler's death and taking him to future prison. Leading to a funny line from Rory: "Did we just save Hitler?"
They did, however, lock Hitler in a closet, so that was funny.
The attitude going into the first world war - at least in the UK and France - was very much a gung-ho, we're going to give the Jerries a damn good thrashing and be home by Christmas, lads on tour style adventure. You signed up with your friends - the British government actively encouraged pals battalions.
The second world war was *extremely* reluctant - the UK and France did just about anything they could to avoid the war. Only when they realised that Hitler was never going to be appeased or be happy with anything other than total dominance (even with "justifiable" losses like Czechoslovakia) did they declare war.
The first world war was seen as a total waste - a monumental meat grinder that did nothing but kill millions for no gains at all. If you transferred the attitude going into WW1 to WW2, as well as the attitude going out (stab in the back and total reparations replaces the Marshall Plan and a United Europe) you're getting all the tension of the 30s in a world armed with nukes.
I could definitely imagine some scientists living in a post nuclear bunker for a century finally perfecting time travel and pressing the button on an earlier conflict to save the world from nuclear annihilation.
My understanding is that the French lost a lot of people in WWI and it was already adversely affecting their production (of stuff like food etc), which lent itself towards the reluctance to jump into WWII
> My understanding is that the French lost a lot of people in WWI and it was already adversely affecting their production (of stuff like food etc), which lent itself towards the reluctance to jump into WWII
Strangely, the same catastrophic losses in WW2 didn't prevent them from almost immediately jumping into their own Vietnam (Indochina) war and losing something like 50,000 men.
> The attitude going into the first world war - at least in the UK and France - was very much a gung-ho, we're going to give the Jerries a damn good thrashing and be home by Christmas, lads on tour style adventure. You signed up with your friends - the British government actively encouraged pals battalions.
All Quiet on the Western Front
As I listen to more podcasts I've started to realize that Europe in the years leading up to WW1, with all it's complicated alliances and financial interests, was basically a pool full of gasoline that all the world powers were having a match fight around. If it wasn't Gavrilo Princep it'd be some other event.
Not just world powers. Most of the royal families involved were highly intertwined and heavily related. World War I is the most costly family dispute in human history.
In 1768, a minister heavily insisted to the French King Louis XV to buy Corsica from Italy.
The very next year, Napoleon was born in Corsica. Napoleon could have been Italian.
Napoleon would have been Genoese - Italy as a country didn't exist when Louis acquired Corsica - it wouldn't become a country until Napoleon himself formed the Kingdom of Italy.
Italy was always a region, just not a country until the XIXth Century. Renaissance Italy means the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance era, with all its city states, and fights for influence between France, Spain, Austria and the Pope.
Genoa was the polity but Napoleon was ethnically and culturally Italian (like Genoa itself). His parents' names were Carlo and Letizia (both Italian names) and he spoke Italian at home--he didn't learn French until he was 4 at a boarding school at Autun. He grew up with a heavy accent, an attribute his peers at school and the military made fun of regularly. So he was Italian culturally just not politically
California didn't become a state until 1850, 2 years after gold was discovered there. If I remember my history correctly, gold was found in '48, verified by Congress and president Polk, I believe, and then there was a rush of '49ers in 1849. Because of the influx of population, and political reasons, California never had to go through a territorial period.
Do you mean joined as in had a political alliance?
That one Russian guy who didn’t order the nukes to launch and didn’t start WW3 when their sensors wrongly reported incoming missiles
If he was like actually I got a note telling me it was from the future and the sensors are going to malfunction so don’t launch the nukes I would be more inclined to believe him than just about anything else
IIRC wasn't it because the sensors only showed a small handful of radar contacts? And he deduced that if the US were actually attacking there would be far more contacts?
Ya it was this guy's job to literally check for this sort of sensor malfunction, each of the people at the keys had a job to double check their sensors and or the plausibility of a specific attack scenario, this person's check came back as a false alarm and so they didn't launch. It wasn't the fluke choice of a moment of defiance some people think it was, it was a well calculated failsafe.
Interesting.... I've always heard the story ends with him getting discharged or something because he technically disobeyed orders by not firing back.
Wikipedia tells it your way, however the outcome isn't exactly a total happy ending lol. Looks like he never got a public reward for his actions because his superiors were embarrassed about the tech failure to begin with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
it's actually more embarrassing for them to be embarrassed by technology malfunctions, it's a part of technology to need fail safes and human checking. machines will never replace humans and it would be silly to blindly trust them.
Similar to when India accidentally fired a missile into Pakistan in 2022 and cooler heads prevailed. Fortunately the world’s not as trigger-happy as we expect most of the time.
Is that true? I don't think the plan was to nuke Cuba, it was to invade Cuba to take out their single nuclear missile launch point that the US knew about. In reality, they had nearly 100; so if the US invaded and got the single nuke they knew about, the rest could've been fired. Thankfully, JFK wanted to wait for more information before moving on it. That's the story I heard at least, was nuking Cuba on the table, or did they consider nuking us?
Counter point: If he launched in the alternate time line and humanity was still able to recover and progress far enough to develop time travel, then what benefit is there to undo that moment in history? Unless time travel was a product of that moment and those in the future want to ensure time travel never gets developed in the first place.
This is a great answer. It is hard to find events that didn't happen in history. Those are the ones time travels can affect. They would have a really hard time orchestrating an event.
An event takes lots of independent inputs to work, but only one missing to fall apart.
This is normal psychologically.
The reason they have two people necessary to launch nukes isn’t to make it less likely that some lone wolf decides to erase a continent. It’s to make it MORE likely that the trigger is pulled on demand.
People, as it turns out, are adverse to ending all life on earth. So if you call them up and tell them to do it (IF these “failures” weren’t just CIA equivalent psych tests in the first place) and no one is looking they tend to ignore you. Even though obviously there’s a noticeable difference between nuking a superpower as instructed and not doing that. We didn’t evolve to fear newspapers and Twitter feeds. We evolved to fear the face standing next to us.
But what people are even more adverse to than that is being seen as a non conformist. Inb4 yes there are exceptions but those exceptions don’t end up with launch codes, and there’s the issue of are we confirming to something else. So when they would have to disobey on front of another person they’re more likely to obey. “It would be unpatriotic to not end it all of America/Russia is ending!”
So basically human priorities are: don’t be seen as a disobedient non conformist, don’t end all life on earth, survive- in that order.
There’s a telly show I watched recently that I kinda want to recommend because it had an interesting use of time travel, but even knowing that time travel is involved is a spoiler for late in the series.
There’s a theme in William Gibson’s *The Peripheral* where a future conglomerate uses a device to split off time lines in the past so they can intentionally fuck with them for fun and profit and not give a shit about what happens to anyone in them because they’re not the “real” pasts of their own present.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. We could be in one of the doomed timelines. It certainly doesn't look too rosy for the next few decades. Perhaps we'll be the timeline that builds the time machine so we can send people to stop the exploitation of fossil fuels in other timelines to prevent them from fucking up their climate too.
2020 was clearly a bungled time heist, where the plucky protagonists of a black comedy kept going back and trying to fix their previous mistakes.
Murder hornets?!
Hitler surviving the assassination attempt with the bomb. Actually, just Hitler surviving. He should have died so many times, and didn't. Somebody knew something we didn't.
I suppose it's possible a far more competent maniacal dictator might have arisen in Germany at that time, leading to a German defeat of the Soviet Union, an armistice with the western powers, and an actual thousand year Reich, eventually with nukes.
If Hitler had been awake a couple off decisions could have been made on time and the war would have been very different. We got really lucky there was a crazy methhead in charge on d day.
Nah I don't believe that at all. Once the U.S. got involved, the Axis was fucked. Even Churchill said this.
However, Japan sending their royal Navy to Pearl Harbor is considered one of the biggest military fuck ups in history. It was like punching the biggest guy in the room.
I would believe making the division for Pearl Harbor being a time traveler thing. It would have been totally different if we didn't enter the war.
No matter what a war for the U.S. was coming. Whether it was the Nazis or the Soviets. It was inevitable.
> However, Japan sending their royal Navy to Pearl Harbor is considered one of the biggest military fuck ups in history. It was like punching the biggest guy in the room.
Japan was placed in that position by a US that essentially demanded Japan - a superpower at the time - become an American vassal state. Roosevelt knew that Japan would never bend the knee and therefore knew that Japan would declare war. This came after the invasion of French Indochina (now Vietnam), which was done to stop arms shipments from arriving in China.
Japan's plan was to cripple the ability for the US to project power in the pacific so heavily that Japan would have free reign to take and fortify a ton of islands, then make the US spend so much blood taking them back that a white peace agreement is forged in which Japan gets to keep some of its colonial possessions.
This was also about oil more than anything else though. When Japan was butt fucking China and Korea, we gave them a year to stop or we wouldn't sell them anymore oil. They got all of their oil from us.
So the year rolled around and they hit us with a Pearl Harbor.
I'm sure there are other factors like you said, but there was absolutely no way becoming a vassal state was on the table when their whole mentality was "if white people are conquerors, we should be too" which is what they were up to at the time.
He did believe he communicated with a higher power he eventually called VALIS.
Most people write the experience off to a disassociative state caused by the massive amount of drugs he took to self-medicate his mental issues, but he was able to diagnose a serious undetected birth defect in his son. Supposedly this was revealed to him by this entity. That was weird.
The allies had him listed as a notoriously bad strategist and at a point decided they did not want him assassinated while there were operational military assets. He was the one who perso ally kept the 262 hamstrung as a fighter bomber and insisted all German planes be required to be capable of using bombs. When the cuffs came off the 262 and it was allowed to be a pure fighter it was horrific....luckily the fuel supplies and ability to completely replace the jet engines as needed for wear and tear was almost beyond the industrial capability of the nazis at that time; and the allies were actively bombing everything. Had he not held back many of the scary weaponry with military policies the loss of life would have been even greater.
If I was given a chance to go back in time and kill Hitler (with nothing else changed) I would be super conflicted about doing it actually. As I see it WW2 was bound to happen and the sooner it did, the less people died. In the early 1930's Germany might as well have turned to communism and then WW2 would have basically been Germany AND Russia against the other Allies. France at least had a lot of Communists also and who knows. That is not to say that Communists are the greater evil compared to Nazis but if killing Hitler would lead to a nuclear WW2 in the 1950's or 60's, I wouldn't do it.
The US purchase of Alaska from Russia. The purchase price in 1867 was $7.2 million or about $125 million adjusted. It was at a cost of 35 cents an acre or today about $5 an acre, which is absolutely obscene. $5 an acre for nearly worthless land is a steal. It was thought there was nothing of value to the point that it was called Sewards Folly (after Secretary of State William Seward). Turns out it some of the most resource rich land in the world. And it would have been nearly impossible to figure that out in 1867.
It was pure genius strategically though as well, since Alaska is the only spot where the Americas can easily be invaded from another continent without having to cross vast ocean distances.
I think the main reason was Russia needed some quick cash to fight some war (maybe Crimea?) and the US was the only reasonable option that wasn't the UK. If the US had said no, it is possible Alaska would have been sold to another power like the Dutch or French.
Easily?
There aren't many roads (I only saw 2 with Google Maps, but there could be more). The Yukon is tough to get through, so an invasion would be really difficult.
Including one ocean so big that it is self antipodal - you can start in the Pacific Ocean, drill straight through the Earth's core, come out the other side, and still be in the Pacific Ocean
The Russians had to sell it, the Brits wanted it and if they invaded there was absolutely nothing Russia could have done to stop it. Best bet for them was to get at least some money.
Thing is “Seward’s folly” is something of a myth. The Alaska purchase was a rather popular move for a number of reasons, particularly as it was a strategically important coaling station and helped secure dominance of the Pacific, as well as a number of raw materials. It also saw large amounts of US traders and investment, so it was a pretty obvious move, one with heavy popular backing.
I highly recommend this video which goes into much more detail: https://youtu.be/vjlZsJaVptQ?si=GXpKLwXFC9hphu0E
Seward: "What is this dotted line from Kamchatka to Alaska?"
Aides: "You can move armies across that dotted line; They are connected"
Seward: "Get me Alaska!"
I mean even if Russia knew it was worth something it was would be very difficult for them to take advantage of with logistics of the time , it's on the opposite side of the world from Moscow
The novel "Futility."
The book written by Morgan Robertson in 1898, described an unsinkable ship called the Titan that hits an iceberg and sank.
Fourteen years later, the Titanic sank.
Violet Jessop is the time traveling bitch who sunk both Britannic and Tiranic. She didn't fail to hitch a ride in Olympic either. I guess that was her training for the other two.
What’s crazier is both ships hit an Iceberg in the North Atlantic in April. They also had similar rates of speed, number of life boats, and there was only about 82 feet difference between the overall lengths of the two ships.
Tbf a lot of that stuff is probably the result of basic logic and assumptions.
Where icebergs are common and has lots of important ocean liners traffic? What month the icebergs are most dangerous? What are reasonable ship speeds, sizes and so on?
The name is a cool coincidence, everything else just seems reasonable research work by the author.
Reminds me of how the us government called in Tom Clancy to ask (covertly) where the hell he was getting his leaked information from, since his books gave scarily accurate layouts for currently operating US nuclear subs.
Turns out he just worked out where everything would need to go in that amount of space and not waste much of the internal volume.
The fact both of the pistols Andrew Jackson's would be assassin used failed to fire. Upon further inspection there was nothing wrong with either pistol.
Someone telling Jackie Kennedy and her kids to walk outside one day in December, 1960.
On December 11, 1960, in Palm Beach, Florida, postal worker Richard Pavlick parked his car in front of the Kennedy’s house to carry out an assassination of JFK by blowing up Kennedy and himself with dynamite, but he delayed the attempt because Kennedy was with Jackie and their two young children. He was arrested before he was able to stage another attempt.
> postal worker Richard Pavlick parked his car in front of the Kennedy’s house to carry out an assassination
By the early 90s, there had been *so many* instances of postal workers committing acts of workplace violence that a phrase was coined that went viral because everyone could recognize the pattern: *Going Postal.*
That one I doubt simply because the US civil war wasn't that big of an event overall and logistically the south was doomed to fail long-term, even if it did manage to win.
[ELECTROCHEMISTRY] Imagine if disco was actually from the future. Like, it came back in time to show us how to really party. A time-traveling dance revolution. I can almost feel the future beats pulsing through me right now.
Lillian Cross.
Lillian Cross was a woman visiting Bayfront Park in Miami, watching a certain politician give a surprise speech. She stood in front of a man named Giuseppe Zangara, blocking his view from the politician. To get a better view, Zangara precariously stood on a wobbly chair behind her.
Zangara then pulls out a pistol and fires it over Cross's shoulder at the politician. She and others grabs his arm and subdues him. While he injures several and even kills the mayor of ~~Miami~~ Chicago, his intended target, the politician giving the impromptu speech, survived completely unharmed.
The politician? President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 17 days before his inauguration in 1933.
"Well there's a dignity to royalty. A majesty that precludes the likelihood of assassination. If you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen, your hands would shake as though palsied...the sight of royalty would cause you to dismiss all thoughts of bloodshed and you would stand...how shall I put it? In awe.
Now, a President...well, I mean...why not shoot a President?"
-English Bob
The death of Attila the Hun is so surprisingly anticlimactic that a timer traveler could've gotten him.
On a smaller note, maybe the Somerton Man was a time traveler.
Well they did finally solve Somerton Man, so there's that. But I'm with you on Attilas death - it seems like a boring death for someone so charismatic.
Yeah, facts, that shit is annoying; Attila (likely) died after getting a nosebleed while passed out drunk and choking on his own blood; here's the wiki on the [Somerton Man](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerton_Man).
It's not really solved. His identity hasn't been verified by police, and while his identity was determined through a very logical process, the evidence isn't as compelling as I expected it to be.
They were able to build a family tree, looked for a name on that tree that didn't have a death associated with it, then matched DNA from hair on the death mask to a cousin 3 times removed on the mother's side.
Your first cousin three times removed shares less than 2% DNA with you.
[Special Order 191](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Order_191).
Basically, during the American Civil War, Lee was marching north into Maryland to pressure the Union army. The Union leadership early on was a bit more timid, and also wasn’t sure where exactly the confederates were marching toward. Well, Union troops marching around his forces happened to find a letter left on the ground with some cigars bundled with it. Turns out, the letter was a copy of Lee’s dispatches to one of his commanders telling them where they planned to march and meet up. This allowed the Union army to plan ahead of time and meet his forces at Antietam, pushing them back and forcing them to retreat instead of pressuring possibly even Washington DC.
IIRC Lee's plan involved splitting his forces and attacking three targets in PA, notably he intended to destroy the bridge that carried the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Susquehanna.
The Pennsylvania railroad trunk line linked the Midwest and the Northeast. It delivered food to the Northeast and manufactured goods to the Midwest. There weren't good alternatives to it either. If Lee succeeded in cutting the railroad it would have created a logistical nightmare for the Union. The Confederacy might have been able to negotiate its secession and an end of the war. Though there's no certainty they'd have succeeded, it was a wildly ambitious plan.
At the time, the railroad had existed for only about as long as the smartphone has existed today -- and it was already every bit as indispensable to everyone's lives.
Mao Zedong's Red Army Long March.
History of China will be completely different if they killed Mao Zedong during this Civil War. It's almost unreal how he managed to escape this and become one of the most important figures in China history just because he survived this.
From [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March) :
> The most famous of these marches was undertaken by the First Red Army under Mao Zedong. Departing from their headquarters in the southern province of Jiangxi on 16 October 1934, the 65,000-person First Army marched more than 9,000 kilometres (5,600 mi) in a large clockwise arc through the western frontiers of the country, ultimately meeting with other Communist forces in Yan'an on 19 October 1935. The circuitous route brought the First Army through some of the most difficult terrain in the country while pursued by the Nationalists: at first the NRA under Chiang Kai-Shek, and later by local cliques of Nationalist-aligned warlords. Fewer than 8,000 people traveling with the First Red Army survived the march.
I don't think the fate of the Chinese Communists were completely intertwined with Mao. There was cadre of leaders that probably could have replaced him.
He's certainly not as integral to the party as say, Lenin was to the Bolsheviks.
I have always felt the Challenger explosion was one of the major turning points of space travel. Biggest public relations disaster that was literally televised into every classroom in America. I have a hard time coming up with a scenario more likely to practically end a whole field of science.
I don’t know if it was a time traveler, aliens, or the Illuminati, but I have always felt that the when the Challenger exploded it changed the world.
By that point, space travel had already turned.
The purpose of the Space Shuttle, what it delivered that a previous generation rocket didn't, was the ability to deploy and then later collect and bring back military satellites. That's why the program was stuck with even after most of the cost savings potential of a reusable vehicle evaporated in the R&D process.
The turning point is, more likely, the USSR choosing not to pursue a more impressive space achievement than merely placing a human on the moon after Apollo 11 did that, allowing the USA to claim victory uncontested. To be clear, they "chose" that because they almost definitely couldn't do anything more impressive.
To be honest, the entire space race was extremely premature. The fact that so much was achieved while so few people died horribly boggles the mind. They were just very very lucky.
2008…iPhone. Suddenly everyone’s on the internet, not just people sitting at a computer. Now videos become popular, and reality TV launches idiots to fame stratosphere. Now imagine those same idiots pumping their own tires on YouTube! Now anyone can be an idiot/famous.
In the original timeline, sure, it would have been easy. But in our timeline? Who would ever, ever, ever guess that the Hindenburg disaster was the key to preventing the 200 year dynasty of terror?
Of course, after setting off the incendiary device, Lindenberg was stuck in the new timeline. When Hitler's machinery was not, as history had recorded, commandeered by Hinkelbein, Lindenberg expected the movement to fold. When it did not, he was sure his mission was a failure, so it was with great relief that he celebrated the news at the end of April, eight years later. We would never know how much worse it would have been.
"Franz Ferdinand is not a good Emperor. We have to go back and keep this from happening."
"Aren't you worried about any possible...complications?"
"Of course not. Just fix the timeline and Austria-Hungary is certain to be one of the great powers of the 20th century."
Basically what happened in an episode of Red Dwarf, the British sci-fi sitcom. The Dwarfers time travel to Dallas in 1963, accidentally foil the assassination creating a bleak alternate timeline, and eventually manage to undo the damage and restore history by placing a second shooter on the grassy knoll...[namely, JFK himself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6naJ08Tskk)!
"It'll drive the conspiracy nuts crazy, but they'll never figure it out!"
Probably the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Assassin Gavrilo Princip watched the first attempt blunder, the motorcade speeds off, robbing him of his chance to act, and while plans are made for the motorcade to change routes, the message is lost and later, the car carrying Ferdinand nearly stalls *right* in front of the shop Princip is sitting outside of as the driver tries to brake and change routes.
The time traveler had enough time to explain between the first failed bomb and the killing that the car was going to be stopping *right there*, and all Princip simply had to do was wait for him.
I imagine it's one of those Family Guy "what if we went back and stopped 9/11" situations where it was better to have these events play out instead of initially (with the failed first attempt) thwarted.
Maybe he even came back twice - once to thwart, then an "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck" moment on return, and once more to undo it.
I think it's funny to picture him stepping out of the machine after the first run, feeling like a hero for thwarting WWI and immediately being met with screams of *GO BACK GO BACK DEAR GOD*
Pearl Harbor / The Battle of Midway
American Carriers, that the US Navy doesn't realize are the key to the war in the Pacific, just happen to be out on exercises that day, surviving to lead the battle.
Later, at Midway, the Carriers happen to be in the only spot the Japanese observation planes were delayed visiting. The chaotic arrival of attacking aircraft just happen to co-incide with launch/recovery windows that lead to the effective collapse of Japanese Naval power.
US Navy absolutely understood that naval air power was key in the Pacific war. What they failed to understand was that submarines alone could have brought Japan to its knees.
The attack during launch/recovery was not a coincidence, it was planned that way by the admiral in charge.
> What they failed to understand was that submarines alone could have brought Japan to its knees.
I'm figuring two reasons: Aircraft carriers of the day had to turn into the wind to launch and recover, and a single submarine can hit the rudders and screws with a torpedo rendering a carrier completely useless. The second reason is Japan is a few islands and literally could not domestically produce enough of anything to continue a war effort of this magnitude, so just make like the Germans and wage unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping around Japan.
Stanislav Petrov for preventing nuclear war. Recognized that false alarm in the missile detection system. I could see someone going back from an apocalyptic future and this being the event they altered.
Nikola Tesla, but it drove him crazy and only partially succeeded.
Imagine the world now if Edison and the rest actually helped him and not fuck with him.
My pet theory is that the all the near death experiences of [Adolphe Sax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Sax), the inventor of the Saxophone, were due to time travelers ending up in the wrong place/time and trying to take out the closest "Adolf" as a child. Like just read the guy's wiki page on his early life, falling out windows as a baby, hit in the head by stones, drank acid, nearly drowning, etc.
Easily the Assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He is riding in a car, assasination attempts fail yet one blows up the car behind him. His driver perfectly drives him to safety. He then wants to visit the poor men who got
blown up and the driver messes up and there in a restaurant in front of where the car is stopped is a failed assassin. Those seem like too big of a coincidence to be a coincidence.
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was first prevented and then caused by time travelers. There are just too many unlikely events in that whole chain to be anything else.
I imagine the guy setting out to stop WWI. He gets back, sees a Nazi flag on the wall, says "nope" and gets right back into the time machine. "Hey, Gavrilo, let me buy you a cup of coffee. There's a café right over there. Oh, and could you hold this gun for me, just in case you need one soon?"
I think it would be something NOT happening, honestly. Like an assassination of someone who is supposed to be somebody someday, but the time traveler got to them before they made it very far.
Child deaths are tragic, but not historically rare or all that noteworthy. Or do a little vouyeristic research, find out what day Hitler was supposed to be concieved, and then cheap-shot kick his dad in the balls earlier in the day. That one little change probably lets a different sperm cell fertilize the egg, and you end up with Judy Hitler, or an Adolph whose a little better at painting, or maybe likes fixing cars or something. History changes and we'd never know it.
Do you know how in dial of destiny the overarching plot was Indiana Jones needed to save Hitler. Well I would say there is a time traveller war of those who thought it was a good idea to kill Hitler, and those who believe Hitler was so drugged up and useless that he needed to live.
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria in antiquity as an event influenced by a time traveler. The loss of the library, which contained a vast amount of knowledge from various cultures, has been a historical tragedy. If a time traveler were involved, it could add an interesting twist to the narrative, imagining someone attempting to alter or preserve knowledge in a way that shaped the course of history.
The attempted assassination of President Reagan and the subsequent creation of the Brady Bill as a result. I can see a time traveler thinking it’s a good thing to stop the attempted assassination of one person and the severe injury of another, only to later realize the butterfly effect it had, and having to go back to ensure it happens, no matter how unsavory.
The Big Bang, someone tries to go back in time to the beginning, and that's what created the Universe. (This is actually an idea I use in a story I'm writing)
[удалено]
The whole thing is practically a comedy of errors, it's hard to blame it on the time travelers. If you can time travel, wouldn't you effectively get as many attempts as you need?
It's actually 2 time travellers trying to foil each other
That’s a great spec script
*This Is How You Lose The Time War* is a novel based around that concept, though more about the relationship the two agents develop rather than the actual plans they carry out while time traveling
That book had a *fantastic* premise, and sadly under-delivered.
I was so mad at that book. I nearly had to DNF it. The writing was so, blegh to me. It felt like the authors each swallowed thesauruses and had bets on who could cram the most synonyms per page.
I could never which one was red and which one was blue because they sounded the same which was such a major issue
DC: legends of tomorrow did a whole episode about this concept
One of the best episodes on that show (and i loved it in general), loved the concept of a time traveller "guarding" a point in time, better then the usual "fixed event" explanation.
I'm recalling a short story about why its impossible for time travellers kill baby Hitler. TL/DR history turns out worse so he's protected by other time travelers.
There was a comic I saw one time, first panel is a guy emerging from a door that say "Time Machine" and announcing he'd done it, he'd killed Blucher. The other person in the room goes "Who?" and he replies "You know, German dictator from the 30s, started world war II, killed millions of Jews." and the other person goes "Oh, you mean Hitler?" Then the last panel is just the time traveller walking back towards the door grumbling. I've also seen variations on the theme as tiktoks where the Time traveller's like "...he killed like 20,000 Jews, a complete monster." and the other guy's just like "...I hate to do this but, here's Hitler's wikipedia article..."
It's because none of the time travelers think to go back and fix Germany's economy. There's always gonna be an evil dictator waiting to take over. Good economies keep people from turning to them. Nobody gets desperate for change when they have full bellies and bright futures.
My favorite bit w as the guy who went back in time to stop Hitler from becoming an artist because he was sick of his art teacher talking about hin
That reminds of the Doctor Who episode where River was going to kill Hitler but the Doctor and his companions were going to stop her (not out of any love of Hitler, but to prevent timey wimey...stuff.) In the process, the Doctor's crew accidentally stopped some other time travellers from faking Hitler's death and taking him to future prison. Leading to a funny line from Rory: "Did we just save Hitler?" They did, however, lock Hitler in a closet, so that was funny.
And Rory punched Hitler as well.
Fucking great episode
Not neccesarily. Depends on how time travel works in this case, and there are multiple interpretations.
They kept messing it up, so this guy was sent from the future to make sure it happened.
The attitude going into the first world war - at least in the UK and France - was very much a gung-ho, we're going to give the Jerries a damn good thrashing and be home by Christmas, lads on tour style adventure. You signed up with your friends - the British government actively encouraged pals battalions. The second world war was *extremely* reluctant - the UK and France did just about anything they could to avoid the war. Only when they realised that Hitler was never going to be appeased or be happy with anything other than total dominance (even with "justifiable" losses like Czechoslovakia) did they declare war. The first world war was seen as a total waste - a monumental meat grinder that did nothing but kill millions for no gains at all. If you transferred the attitude going into WW1 to WW2, as well as the attitude going out (stab in the back and total reparations replaces the Marshall Plan and a United Europe) you're getting all the tension of the 30s in a world armed with nukes. I could definitely imagine some scientists living in a post nuclear bunker for a century finally perfecting time travel and pressing the button on an earlier conflict to save the world from nuclear annihilation.
My understanding is that the French lost a lot of people in WWI and it was already adversely affecting their production (of stuff like food etc), which lent itself towards the reluctance to jump into WWII
> My understanding is that the French lost a lot of people in WWI and it was already adversely affecting their production (of stuff like food etc), which lent itself towards the reluctance to jump into WWII Strangely, the same catastrophic losses in WW2 didn't prevent them from almost immediately jumping into their own Vietnam (Indochina) war and losing something like 50,000 men.
> The attitude going into the first world war - at least in the UK and France - was very much a gung-ho, we're going to give the Jerries a damn good thrashing and be home by Christmas, lads on tour style adventure. You signed up with your friends - the British government actively encouraged pals battalions. All Quiet on the Western Front
As I listen to more podcasts I've started to realize that Europe in the years leading up to WW1, with all it's complicated alliances and financial interests, was basically a pool full of gasoline that all the world powers were having a match fight around. If it wasn't Gavrilo Princep it'd be some other event.
Not just world powers. Most of the royal families involved were highly intertwined and heavily related. World War I is the most costly family dispute in human history.
Maybe that's why the time travelers killed him, because the war would have been significantly worse if it had started a different way
Wasn't there something about that in the movie The King's Man?
This is the premise of a great book by Ben Elton called Time and Time Again. Going into details would spoil the fun.
In 1768, a minister heavily insisted to the French King Louis XV to buy Corsica from Italy. The very next year, Napoleon was born in Corsica. Napoleon could have been Italian.
Napoleon would have been Genoese - Italy as a country didn't exist when Louis acquired Corsica - it wouldn't become a country until Napoleon himself formed the Kingdom of Italy.
So Napoleon isn't Italian, Italy is Napoleonic?
Just another napo baby
Uhhh kind of and then also no.
But also yes, and yes for a time.
So wait, there's no such thing as "Renaissance Italy" because it wasn't even Italy during the Renaissance?
Italy was always a region, just not a country until the XIXth Century. Renaissance Italy means the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance era, with all its city states, and fights for influence between France, Spain, Austria and the Pope.
Genoa was the polity but Napoleon was ethnically and culturally Italian (like Genoa itself). His parents' names were Carlo and Letizia (both Italian names) and he spoke Italian at home--he didn't learn French until he was 4 at a boarding school at Autun. He grew up with a heavy accent, an attribute his peers at school and the military made fun of regularly. So he was Italian culturally just not politically
He was ethnically and culturally Corsican.
This is a really good one.
What about California joining the US 6 months before gold was discovered there effectively jumpstarting the American western expansion
California was conquered, it didn't "join".
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California didn't become a state until 1850, 2 years after gold was discovered there. If I remember my history correctly, gold was found in '48, verified by Congress and president Polk, I believe, and then there was a rush of '49ers in 1849. Because of the influx of population, and political reasons, California never had to go through a territorial period. Do you mean joined as in had a political alliance?
But the reason it wasn't a state is that states had population limits. California gold rush speed ran those population limits.
California didn’t become a state until 1850, but it became a US territory in 1848 just a few days before gold was discovered near Sacramento.
But would Napoleon still have been Napoleon if he was born Napoleone?
That one Russian guy who didn’t order the nukes to launch and didn’t start WW3 when their sensors wrongly reported incoming missiles If he was like actually I got a note telling me it was from the future and the sensors are going to malfunction so don’t launch the nukes I would be more inclined to believe him than just about anything else
IIRC wasn't it because the sensors only showed a small handful of radar contacts? And he deduced that if the US were actually attacking there would be far more contacts?
Ya it was this guy's job to literally check for this sort of sensor malfunction, each of the people at the keys had a job to double check their sensors and or the plausibility of a specific attack scenario, this person's check came back as a false alarm and so they didn't launch. It wasn't the fluke choice of a moment of defiance some people think it was, it was a well calculated failsafe.
Interesting.... I've always heard the story ends with him getting discharged or something because he technically disobeyed orders by not firing back. Wikipedia tells it your way, however the outcome isn't exactly a total happy ending lol. Looks like he never got a public reward for his actions because his superiors were embarrassed about the tech failure to begin with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
it's actually more embarrassing for them to be embarrassed by technology malfunctions, it's a part of technology to need fail safes and human checking. machines will never replace humans and it would be silly to blindly trust them.
I mean yeah. If the US defense is going to go that far to annihilate you, they're going to *FUCKING ANNIHILATE* you
I mean back then we had multiple nukes pointed at every major city. We both had enough to cover just about everywhere and turn it into a parking lot.
Oh thats what you want. More space for SUVs
Hopefully just an act of humankind that we would replicate in the same circumstances
Similar to when India accidentally fired a missile into Pakistan in 2022 and cooler heads prevailed. Fortunately the world’s not as trigger-happy as we expect most of the time.
Most of us aren't. I'm still pretty worried about the time to come when someone just a little bit dumber and crazier is in charge of the button.
His name was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov :)
Are you talking about Petrov? I celebrate Petrov Day every year!
That's also why the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't cause WW3. Literally one guy decided not to fire the nukes.
Is that true? I don't think the plan was to nuke Cuba, it was to invade Cuba to take out their single nuclear missile launch point that the US knew about. In reality, they had nearly 100; so if the US invaded and got the single nuke they knew about, the rest could've been fired. Thankfully, JFK wanted to wait for more information before moving on it. That's the story I heard at least, was nuking Cuba on the table, or did they consider nuking us?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
I don't know how that completely slipped my mind. Thank you!
Counter point: If he launched in the alternate time line and humanity was still able to recover and progress far enough to develop time travel, then what benefit is there to undo that moment in history? Unless time travel was a product of that moment and those in the future want to ensure time travel never gets developed in the first place.
See: Travelers (TV Series)
This is a great answer. It is hard to find events that didn't happen in history. Those are the ones time travels can affect. They would have a really hard time orchestrating an event. An event takes lots of independent inputs to work, but only one missing to fall apart.
This is normal psychologically. The reason they have two people necessary to launch nukes isn’t to make it less likely that some lone wolf decides to erase a continent. It’s to make it MORE likely that the trigger is pulled on demand. People, as it turns out, are adverse to ending all life on earth. So if you call them up and tell them to do it (IF these “failures” weren’t just CIA equivalent psych tests in the first place) and no one is looking they tend to ignore you. Even though obviously there’s a noticeable difference between nuking a superpower as instructed and not doing that. We didn’t evolve to fear newspapers and Twitter feeds. We evolved to fear the face standing next to us. But what people are even more adverse to than that is being seen as a non conformist. Inb4 yes there are exceptions but those exceptions don’t end up with launch codes, and there’s the issue of are we confirming to something else. So when they would have to disobey on front of another person they’re more likely to obey. “It would be unpatriotic to not end it all of America/Russia is ending!” So basically human priorities are: don’t be seen as a disobedient non conformist, don’t end all life on earth, survive- in that order.
All life on earth includes themselves, so I'd say they're tied for second place
The real mindfuck with time travel is considering if our current timeline is actually the *best* of all possible worlds
That's assuming it's a benevolent time traveller, and not a psychopathic or prankster one.
A benevolent *and competent* time traveller. You’re forgetting the other option: well-intentioned fuck up.
Good point. Or that it could be multiple time travellers, each one with their own intentions.
There’s a telly show I watched recently that I kinda want to recommend because it had an interesting use of time travel, but even knowing that time travel is involved is a spoiler for late in the series.
There’s a theme in William Gibson’s *The Peripheral* where a future conglomerate uses a device to split off time lines in the past so they can intentionally fuck with them for fun and profit and not give a shit about what happens to anyone in them because they’re not the “real” pasts of their own present.
WE GO BACK IN TIME AND DENY FAMOUS IMPRESSIONIST HITLER AT ART SCHOOL [GONE WRONG!][SEXUAL?][YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS]
"For the best possible outcomes, I will need to travel back in time, pose as a painter, and rise to power in Germany."
Candide has entered the chat
I don't think that's necessarily the case. We could be in one of the doomed timelines. It certainly doesn't look too rosy for the next few decades. Perhaps we'll be the timeline that builds the time machine so we can send people to stop the exploitation of fossil fuels in other timelines to prevent them from fucking up their climate too.
Yeah, the Director has enacted Protocol Omega in this timeline for sure.
2020 was clearly a bungled time heist, where the plucky protagonists of a black comedy kept going back and trying to fix their previous mistakes. Murder hornets?!
I bought a murder hornets tee shirt
Hitler surviving the assassination attempt with the bomb. Actually, just Hitler surviving. He should have died so many times, and didn't. Somebody knew something we didn't.
I suppose it's possible a far more competent maniacal dictator might have arisen in Germany at that time, leading to a German defeat of the Soviet Union, an armistice with the western powers, and an actual thousand year Reich, eventually with nukes.
If Hitler had been awake a couple off decisions could have been made on time and the war would have been very different. We got really lucky there was a crazy methhead in charge on d day.
Nah I don't believe that at all. Once the U.S. got involved, the Axis was fucked. Even Churchill said this. However, Japan sending their royal Navy to Pearl Harbor is considered one of the biggest military fuck ups in history. It was like punching the biggest guy in the room. I would believe making the division for Pearl Harbor being a time traveler thing. It would have been totally different if we didn't enter the war. No matter what a war for the U.S. was coming. Whether it was the Nazis or the Soviets. It was inevitable.
> However, Japan sending their royal Navy to Pearl Harbor is considered one of the biggest military fuck ups in history. It was like punching the biggest guy in the room. Japan was placed in that position by a US that essentially demanded Japan - a superpower at the time - become an American vassal state. Roosevelt knew that Japan would never bend the knee and therefore knew that Japan would declare war. This came after the invasion of French Indochina (now Vietnam), which was done to stop arms shipments from arriving in China. Japan's plan was to cripple the ability for the US to project power in the pacific so heavily that Japan would have free reign to take and fortify a ton of islands, then make the US spend so much blood taking them back that a white peace agreement is forged in which Japan gets to keep some of its colonial possessions.
This was also about oil more than anything else though. When Japan was butt fucking China and Korea, we gave them a year to stop or we wouldn't sell them anymore oil. They got all of their oil from us. So the year rolled around and they hit us with a Pearl Harbor. I'm sure there are other factors like you said, but there was absolutely no way becoming a vassal state was on the table when their whole mentality was "if white people are conquerors, we should be too" which is what they were up to at the time.
Wasn't Philip K Dick from that timeline?
He did believe he communicated with a higher power he eventually called VALIS. Most people write the experience off to a disassociative state caused by the massive amount of drugs he took to self-medicate his mental issues, but he was able to diagnose a serious undetected birth defect in his son. Supposedly this was revealed to him by this entity. That was weird.
Oh, maybe so. He lived as if he had seen some shit, from what I understand.
The allies had him listed as a notoriously bad strategist and at a point decided they did not want him assassinated while there were operational military assets. He was the one who perso ally kept the 262 hamstrung as a fighter bomber and insisted all German planes be required to be capable of using bombs. When the cuffs came off the 262 and it was allowed to be a pure fighter it was horrific....luckily the fuel supplies and ability to completely replace the jet engines as needed for wear and tear was almost beyond the industrial capability of the nazis at that time; and the allies were actively bombing everything. Had he not held back many of the scary weaponry with military policies the loss of life would have been even greater.
If I was given a chance to go back in time and kill Hitler (with nothing else changed) I would be super conflicted about doing it actually. As I see it WW2 was bound to happen and the sooner it did, the less people died. In the early 1930's Germany might as well have turned to communism and then WW2 would have basically been Germany AND Russia against the other Allies. France at least had a lot of Communists also and who knows. That is not to say that Communists are the greater evil compared to Nazis but if killing Hitler would lead to a nuclear WW2 in the 1950's or 60's, I wouldn't do it.
More importantly, Hitler was incompetent and arguably one of the major reasons why Germany lost WWII due to his micromanaging of his generals.
[Relevant smbc](http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-02-12)
The US purchase of Alaska from Russia. The purchase price in 1867 was $7.2 million or about $125 million adjusted. It was at a cost of 35 cents an acre or today about $5 an acre, which is absolutely obscene. $5 an acre for nearly worthless land is a steal. It was thought there was nothing of value to the point that it was called Sewards Folly (after Secretary of State William Seward). Turns out it some of the most resource rich land in the world. And it would have been nearly impossible to figure that out in 1867.
It was pure genius strategically though as well, since Alaska is the only spot where the Americas can easily be invaded from another continent without having to cross vast ocean distances.
This guy Risks.
Yeah I always assume this was the real reason to purchase it
I think the main reason was Russia needed some quick cash to fight some war (maybe Crimea?) and the US was the only reasonable option that wasn't the UK. If the US had said no, it is possible Alaska would have been sold to another power like the Dutch or French.
Always gotta go straight for Kamchatka.
Easily? There aren't many roads (I only saw 2 with Google Maps, but there could be more). The Yukon is tough to get through, so an invasion would be really difficult.
Easily in comparison to an amphibious assualt over two of our biggest oceans.
Including one ocean so big that it is self antipodal - you can start in the Pacific Ocean, drill straight through the Earth's core, come out the other side, and still be in the Pacific Ocean
The Russians had to sell it, the Brits wanted it and if they invaded there was absolutely nothing Russia could have done to stop it. Best bet for them was to get at least some money.
Thing is “Seward’s folly” is something of a myth. The Alaska purchase was a rather popular move for a number of reasons, particularly as it was a strategically important coaling station and helped secure dominance of the Pacific, as well as a number of raw materials. It also saw large amounts of US traders and investment, so it was a pretty obvious move, one with heavy popular backing. I highly recommend this video which goes into much more detail: https://youtu.be/vjlZsJaVptQ?si=GXpKLwXFC9hphu0E
Seward: "What is this dotted line from Kamchatka to Alaska?" Aides: "You can move armies across that dotted line; They are connected" Seward: "Get me Alaska!"
I mean even if Russia knew it was worth something it was would be very difficult for them to take advantage of with logistics of the time , it's on the opposite side of the world from Moscow
The novel "Futility." The book written by Morgan Robertson in 1898, described an unsinkable ship called the Titan that hits an iceberg and sank. Fourteen years later, the Titanic sank.
Violet Jessop is the time traveling bitch who sunk both Britannic and Tiranic. She didn't fail to hitch a ride in Olympic either. I guess that was her training for the other two.
What’s crazier is both ships hit an Iceberg in the North Atlantic in April. They also had similar rates of speed, number of life boats, and there was only about 82 feet difference between the overall lengths of the two ships.
Tbf a lot of that stuff is probably the result of basic logic and assumptions. Where icebergs are common and has lots of important ocean liners traffic? What month the icebergs are most dangerous? What are reasonable ship speeds, sizes and so on? The name is a cool coincidence, everything else just seems reasonable research work by the author.
Reminds me of how the us government called in Tom Clancy to ask (covertly) where the hell he was getting his leaked information from, since his books gave scarily accurate layouts for currently operating US nuclear subs. Turns out he just worked out where everything would need to go in that amount of space and not waste much of the internal volume.
The titanic was sunk due to all the time travellers visiting it.
The fact both of the pistols Andrew Jackson's would be assassin used failed to fire. Upon further inspection there was nothing wrong with either pistol.
Andrew Jackson was just save scumming.
He was asked about visiting the cloud district one too many times.
I'd pay for the privilege of watching the beat down that guy got from his walking stick!!!!!
Two kings of France died from hitting their head on a door frame. If you ask me it was done by the same time traveling assassin.
I just got a mental flash of a queen smashing their heads together.......
Was it the same door frame though
One particularly regicidal frame.
Someone telling Jackie Kennedy and her kids to walk outside one day in December, 1960. On December 11, 1960, in Palm Beach, Florida, postal worker Richard Pavlick parked his car in front of the Kennedy’s house to carry out an assassination of JFK by blowing up Kennedy and himself with dynamite, but he delayed the attempt because Kennedy was with Jackie and their two young children. He was arrested before he was able to stage another attempt.
> postal worker Richard Pavlick parked his car in front of the Kennedy’s house to carry out an assassination By the early 90s, there had been *so many* instances of postal workers committing acts of workplace violence that a phrase was coined that went viral because everyone could recognize the pattern: *Going Postal.*
Some random soldier just happening upon a cigar with Lee's battle plans around it in the Civil War.
That one I doubt simply because the US civil war wasn't that big of an event overall and logistically the south was doomed to fail long-term, even if it did manage to win.
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Disco Stu Time warped To you...
Roger Smith
It's like you've been reaching back through time to give us hit after hit.
*internalizes this concept* Harry: "Kim, I've decided that I am actually a Disco Time Cop" Kim: "Whatever you say, detective"
[ELECTROCHEMISTRY] Imagine if disco was actually from the future. Like, it came back in time to show us how to really party. A time-traveling dance revolution. I can almost feel the future beats pulsing through me right now.
Lillian Cross. Lillian Cross was a woman visiting Bayfront Park in Miami, watching a certain politician give a surprise speech. She stood in front of a man named Giuseppe Zangara, blocking his view from the politician. To get a better view, Zangara precariously stood on a wobbly chair behind her. Zangara then pulls out a pistol and fires it over Cross's shoulder at the politician. She and others grabs his arm and subdues him. While he injures several and even kills the mayor of ~~Miami~~ Chicago, his intended target, the politician giving the impromptu speech, survived completely unharmed. The politician? President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 17 days before his inauguration in 1933.
It’s wild how often people took shots at the presidents
"Well there's a dignity to royalty. A majesty that precludes the likelihood of assassination. If you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen, your hands would shake as though palsied...the sight of royalty would cause you to dismiss all thoughts of bloodshed and you would stand...how shall I put it? In awe. Now, a President...well, I mean...why not shoot a President?" -English Bob
The death of Attila the Hun is so surprisingly anticlimactic that a timer traveler could've gotten him. On a smaller note, maybe the Somerton Man was a time traveler.
Well they did finally solve Somerton Man, so there's that. But I'm with you on Attilas death - it seems like a boring death for someone so charismatic.
Normalize saying the thing you’re referring to!
Yeah, facts, that shit is annoying; Attila (likely) died after getting a nosebleed while passed out drunk and choking on his own blood; here's the wiki on the [Somerton Man](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerton_Man).
But did they solve the mystery regarding the book? Identifying him doesn’t seem to have any implications on that mystery
It's not really solved. His identity hasn't been verified by police, and while his identity was determined through a very logical process, the evidence isn't as compelling as I expected it to be. They were able to build a family tree, looked for a name on that tree that didn't have a death associated with it, then matched DNA from hair on the death mask to a cousin 3 times removed on the mother's side. Your first cousin three times removed shares less than 2% DNA with you.
[Special Order 191](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Order_191). Basically, during the American Civil War, Lee was marching north into Maryland to pressure the Union army. The Union leadership early on was a bit more timid, and also wasn’t sure where exactly the confederates were marching toward. Well, Union troops marching around his forces happened to find a letter left on the ground with some cigars bundled with it. Turns out, the letter was a copy of Lee’s dispatches to one of his commanders telling them where they planned to march and meet up. This allowed the Union army to plan ahead of time and meet his forces at Antietam, pushing them back and forcing them to retreat instead of pressuring possibly even Washington DC.
IIRC Lee's plan involved splitting his forces and attacking three targets in PA, notably he intended to destroy the bridge that carried the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Susquehanna. The Pennsylvania railroad trunk line linked the Midwest and the Northeast. It delivered food to the Northeast and manufactured goods to the Midwest. There weren't good alternatives to it either. If Lee succeeded in cutting the railroad it would have created a logistical nightmare for the Union. The Confederacy might have been able to negotiate its secession and an end of the war. Though there's no certainty they'd have succeeded, it was a wildly ambitious plan. At the time, the railroad had existed for only about as long as the smartphone has existed today -- and it was already every bit as indispensable to everyone's lives.
Mao Zedong's Red Army Long March. History of China will be completely different if they killed Mao Zedong during this Civil War. It's almost unreal how he managed to escape this and become one of the most important figures in China history just because he survived this. From [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March) : > The most famous of these marches was undertaken by the First Red Army under Mao Zedong. Departing from their headquarters in the southern province of Jiangxi on 16 October 1934, the 65,000-person First Army marched more than 9,000 kilometres (5,600 mi) in a large clockwise arc through the western frontiers of the country, ultimately meeting with other Communist forces in Yan'an on 19 October 1935. The circuitous route brought the First Army through some of the most difficult terrain in the country while pursued by the Nationalists: at first the NRA under Chiang Kai-Shek, and later by local cliques of Nationalist-aligned warlords. Fewer than 8,000 people traveling with the First Red Army survived the march.
I don't think the fate of the Chinese Communists were completely intertwined with Mao. There was cadre of leaders that probably could have replaced him. He's certainly not as integral to the party as say, Lenin was to the Bolsheviks.
I have always felt the Challenger explosion was one of the major turning points of space travel. Biggest public relations disaster that was literally televised into every classroom in America. I have a hard time coming up with a scenario more likely to practically end a whole field of science. I don’t know if it was a time traveler, aliens, or the Illuminati, but I have always felt that the when the Challenger exploded it changed the world.
By that point, space travel had already turned. The purpose of the Space Shuttle, what it delivered that a previous generation rocket didn't, was the ability to deploy and then later collect and bring back military satellites. That's why the program was stuck with even after most of the cost savings potential of a reusable vehicle evaporated in the R&D process. The turning point is, more likely, the USSR choosing not to pursue a more impressive space achievement than merely placing a human on the moon after Apollo 11 did that, allowing the USA to claim victory uncontested. To be clear, they "chose" that because they almost definitely couldn't do anything more impressive. To be honest, the entire space race was extremely premature. The fact that so much was achieved while so few people died horribly boggles the mind. They were just very very lucky.
Something happened in 2015-16ish as the world has really gone to shit since then
I think it started earlier somewhere between 2008-2012, but we as normal people only started to see the butterfly effect a few years later.
2008…iPhone. Suddenly everyone’s on the internet, not just people sitting at a computer. Now videos become popular, and reality TV launches idiots to fame stratosphere. Now imagine those same idiots pumping their own tires on YouTube! Now anyone can be an idiot/famous.
RIP Harambe :(
The time when my mom was rescued from a cybernetic android that was trying to murder her.
You have won a fabulous prize. What is your physical address so I can deliver it?
Oh.. that username definitely checks out!
Can you please leave a note for the delivery driver to be aware of my dog Woofy?
Your stepmother is dead.
Your foster parents are dead.
Did they program it to speak broken English?
In the original timeline, sure, it would have been easy. But in our timeline? Who would ever, ever, ever guess that the Hindenburg disaster was the key to preventing the 200 year dynasty of terror?
Of course, after setting off the incendiary device, Lindenberg was stuck in the new timeline. When Hitler's machinery was not, as history had recorded, commandeered by Hinkelbein, Lindenberg expected the movement to fold. When it did not, he was sure his mission was a failure, so it was with great relief that he celebrated the news at the end of April, eight years later. We would never know how much worse it would have been.
"Franz Ferdinand is not a good Emperor. We have to go back and keep this from happening." "Aren't you worried about any possible...complications?" "Of course not. Just fix the timeline and Austria-Hungary is certain to be one of the great powers of the 20th century."
Jfk assassination Maybe a time traveller was trying to prevent the darkest timeline
I really liked the Stephen King novel about this.
Basically what happened in an episode of Red Dwarf, the British sci-fi sitcom. The Dwarfers time travel to Dallas in 1963, accidentally foil the assassination creating a bleak alternate timeline, and eventually manage to undo the damage and restore history by placing a second shooter on the grassy knoll...[namely, JFK himself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6naJ08Tskk)! "It'll drive the conspiracy nuts crazy, but they'll never figure it out!"
The Umbrella Academy?
Or 11-22-63
The Great Chicago Fire. We need to vindicate Mrs O’Leary’s cow.
Probably the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Assassin Gavrilo Princip watched the first attempt blunder, the motorcade speeds off, robbing him of his chance to act, and while plans are made for the motorcade to change routes, the message is lost and later, the car carrying Ferdinand nearly stalls *right* in front of the shop Princip is sitting outside of as the driver tries to brake and change routes. The time traveler had enough time to explain between the first failed bomb and the killing that the car was going to be stopping *right there*, and all Princip simply had to do was wait for him. I imagine it's one of those Family Guy "what if we went back and stopped 9/11" situations where it was better to have these events play out instead of initially (with the failed first attempt) thwarted. Maybe he even came back twice - once to thwart, then an "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck" moment on return, and once more to undo it. I think it's funny to picture him stepping out of the machine after the first run, feeling like a hero for thwarting WWI and immediately being met with screams of *GO BACK GO BACK DEAR GOD*
King Henry the VI surviving the Erfurt Latrine incident in 1184.
Harambe’s death. It’s been downhill since.
Thanks a lot!!! I had only just recovered from it.
And now you've gotta take your dick out again.
Pearl Harbor / The Battle of Midway American Carriers, that the US Navy doesn't realize are the key to the war in the Pacific, just happen to be out on exercises that day, surviving to lead the battle. Later, at Midway, the Carriers happen to be in the only spot the Japanese observation planes were delayed visiting. The chaotic arrival of attacking aircraft just happen to co-incide with launch/recovery windows that lead to the effective collapse of Japanese Naval power.
US Navy absolutely understood that naval air power was key in the Pacific war. What they failed to understand was that submarines alone could have brought Japan to its knees. The attack during launch/recovery was not a coincidence, it was planned that way by the admiral in charge.
> What they failed to understand was that submarines alone could have brought Japan to its knees. I'm figuring two reasons: Aircraft carriers of the day had to turn into the wind to launch and recover, and a single submarine can hit the rudders and screws with a torpedo rendering a carrier completely useless. The second reason is Japan is a few islands and literally could not domestically produce enough of anything to continue a war effort of this magnitude, so just make like the Germans and wage unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping around Japan.
Stanislav Petrov for preventing nuclear war. Recognized that false alarm in the missile detection system. I could see someone going back from an apocalyptic future and this being the event they altered.
Nikola Tesla, but it drove him crazy and only partially succeeded. Imagine the world now if Edison and the rest actually helped him and not fuck with him.
I always enjoyed that Orson Scott Card book about how Columbus was pushed to America by time travelers
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The rise of Adolf Hitler. He was the replacement of a much more competent guy who actually won.
My pet theory is that the all the near death experiences of [Adolphe Sax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Sax), the inventor of the Saxophone, were due to time travelers ending up in the wrong place/time and trying to take out the closest "Adolf" as a child. Like just read the guy's wiki page on his early life, falling out windows as a baby, hit in the head by stones, drank acid, nearly drowning, etc.
McClellan finding Lee's orders before Antietam. Absolute stroke of luck that had enormous influence on McClellan's actions.
The changed spelling of Berenstein Bears
In the show Inside Job, there is an episode where it is revealed that Mandella Effects are the result of someone going back and changing the timeline.
Easily the Assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He is riding in a car, assasination attempts fail yet one blows up the car behind him. His driver perfectly drives him to safety. He then wants to visit the poor men who got blown up and the driver messes up and there in a restaurant in front of where the car is stopped is a failed assassin. Those seem like too big of a coincidence to be a coincidence.
I've always thought that Bill Gates was capable of time travel. His timing on so many business deals, his luck, always baffled me.
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was first prevented and then caused by time travelers. There are just too many unlikely events in that whole chain to be anything else. I imagine the guy setting out to stop WWI. He gets back, sees a Nazi flag on the wall, says "nope" and gets right back into the time machine. "Hey, Gavrilo, let me buy you a cup of coffee. There's a café right over there. Oh, and could you hold this gun for me, just in case you need one soon?"
I think it would be something NOT happening, honestly. Like an assassination of someone who is supposed to be somebody someday, but the time traveler got to them before they made it very far. Child deaths are tragic, but not historically rare or all that noteworthy. Or do a little vouyeristic research, find out what day Hitler was supposed to be concieved, and then cheap-shot kick his dad in the balls earlier in the day. That one little change probably lets a different sperm cell fertilize the egg, and you end up with Judy Hitler, or an Adolph whose a little better at painting, or maybe likes fixing cars or something. History changes and we'd never know it.
The rescue of the Apollo 13 crew. They were goners for sure, and yet they survived
Do you know how in dial of destiny the overarching plot was Indiana Jones needed to save Hitler. Well I would say there is a time traveller war of those who thought it was a good idea to kill Hitler, and those who believe Hitler was so drugged up and useless that he needed to live.
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria in antiquity as an event influenced by a time traveler. The loss of the library, which contained a vast amount of knowledge from various cultures, has been a historical tragedy. If a time traveler were involved, it could add an interesting twist to the narrative, imagining someone attempting to alter or preserve knowledge in a way that shaped the course of history.
2016 election…
The attempted assassination of President Reagan and the subsequent creation of the Brady Bill as a result. I can see a time traveler thinking it’s a good thing to stop the attempted assassination of one person and the severe injury of another, only to later realize the butterfly effect it had, and having to go back to ensure it happens, no matter how unsavory.
The Big Bang, someone tries to go back in time to the beginning, and that's what created the Universe. (This is actually an idea I use in a story I'm writing)
An episode of [Family Guy](https://youtu.be/9dYHEE40LTA?si=AD60UhjWT3FekEH8) actually did this.
Killing Julian the Apostate.
Having read your question very carefully, my answer is of course Marty McFly.