Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Which war [ever] do you feel had the most impact?

That's a tough one.
TB — (archived)

One of my weak points is that I don't have a good command of detailed world history in my mind. Given a few hours to work on it I could come up with an answer of some kind, but there would be a lot of opinion and speculation tied to it. Same would be true of anyone else's answer I looked up.

"For want of a nail..."

There have been so many battles at the focus of history like this, where such a small thing might have turned things around. And the further back you go in history, the more a single battle or war would change things, or even a single event. Like nudging an asteroid is easier the farther away you do it.

A great many alternative history SF books ride on this kind of thing. The "Lord Darcy" novels take place in an Anglo-French empire in a world where King Richard survived his arrow wound. The entire "Probability Broach" series takes place in a world whose only historical division point was the addition of the word "unanimous" to "consent of the governed" in the Declaration of Independence.

We often hear that "one person or one action doesn't make a difference in the wider world," but if you look at history, you can see that this is often untrue.

One issue I have thought about is "what if China had decided to become an expansionist power?"

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