Dunno if this fits the current history topic description, but it seems fun. What are small plausible events that would have have potentially lead to a big impact?
Rules:
A. The event needs to be pretty innocuous on paper to a normal reader
B. The event has to be plausible (Sam Adams doesn’t invent the machine gun)
C. No randomly having people die off. Person X wins (or doesn’t win) their fight with malaria is plausible. Person X randomly drops dead is not. So deaths that came down to a coin toss are okay, healthy people dying is a no.
D. Rules scale in proportion to their impact. Person X forgets to write a comma leads to a particular battle being lost and that’s about it (very small change, cosmically small outcome) is only a slightly better answer than “Battle Z is lost and now North America is owned by the Bosnian Empire” (large change, cosmically huge outcome).
E. Has to be esoteric enough that a middle schooler would never think of it.
Part of the fun is arguing or speculating about it. Things that spring to my mind
- Gorbachev visits Beijing two months earlier. This is something that is often used to explain his pacifism in facing down Soviet dissent. He was there for the most extreme parts of the protests for democracy and against the reigning regime. He was into that sort of message by and large (loved the word democracy, he genuinely did do meaningful things to democratize the USSR). He was then very aware of when the CCP called in tanks. As a result he may have been more willing to call in troops during the various points at the end of the Soviet Union where force could have realistically kept it together. Maybe the USSR lasts longer.
- Basil II Bulgar Slayer plans his Sicilian Vacation two years earlier. At the time of his death, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II was planning to invade Sicily. He had no significant military campaigns for three years before that. He was an extremely experienced (although quite old) general at that point and the Byzantine Empire was extremely rich. If he invades the (divided and rich) island of Sicily in 1023 he may well take it. Later Byzantine attempts to do so nearly succeed. It’s a long shot, but if he does so then Byzantium could obtain a rich province that’s relatively easily defendable. They don’t have to hire norman mercenaries who can revolt, preventing numerous two-front wars they fought in real life. Without troops bogged down fighting Normans a retaking of the Anatolian Plateau becomes quite plausible so there’s no Crusades. At the most extreme end there’s no Ottomans or age of discovery at all and the road to a Constantinople in 2026 becomes clear, but it’s totally plausible a Mongol invasion hits the reset button on a lot of that in the 1240s, but even then those changes are possible without existing populations of Turkmen in modern turkey.
Open to others