One day you're hanging out at home watching
a movie with your best friend, and you both feel your stomachs grumbling. You decide to order up some food, but as you
pull the delivery app up neither of you can decide between pizza or hamburgers. It's a real toss up, and you could honestly
go for either, but at the last minute you decide on hamburgers and place your order. Your order is shot out to the restaurant,
and a driver near the restaurant accepts the delivery. However, at the same time that driver accepts
your delivery, another driver near the pizza restaurant does not get a chance to accept
your would-be delivery. That driver misses out on the three dollar
tip that he would have gotten from bringing you your piping hot pizza, and a year later
when he goes to apply for college to better his life, he's unable to enroll because he's
short exactly three dollars- the three dollars he would've made on your delivery but didn't. Twenty years later, the pizza delivery driver
never got a chance to go to school and major in political science, and a presidential election
he would have been a candidate in takes place without him, and another person becomes president
of the United States. Two years later halfway through the new president's
first term, aliens from Zeti Reticuli invade the earth, intent on harvesting delicious
human brains. The president freaks out and fails to stop
the invasion, but secretly, the pizza delivery driver who should have been president, was
a strategic genius who could have saved all of humanity. Now, the human race is extinct, and all because
you decided to get burgers instead of pizza twenty three years ago. History is funny, and the smallest choice
can have untold consequences for future generations. In the famous Ray Bradbury story, “A Sound
of Thunder”, a time-traveling hunter inadvertently changes the future of humanity by stepping
on a simple butterfly millions of years in the past. In real history, the smallest changes can
have equally huge consequences, and today we're going to look at some of these critical
junctions in history. 3. Bad security guards launch World War I and
save the world Popular myth states that Gavrilo Princip,
the man who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and launched World War I, had a hankering
for a sandwich which placed him at exactly the right time and place to murder the Archduke
after his first failed attempt. While the sandwich story is exactly that-
a myth- the truth is that it was Ferdinand's own security detail and their bad decision
that led to his death, and shaped the entirety of the 20th century. On June 28th, 1914, the Archduke was parading
through the streets of Sarajevo despite threats against his life by Bosnian separatists. The motorcade's route had been published well
in advance in order so that more people would be able to flock to the streets and see the
heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne in person. Predictably, Bosnian terrorists tried to kill
the Archduke by throwing a bomb under his car as it passed by- but the fuse was delayed
and the bomb exploded behind the Archduke's car, injuring several of his men. The motorcade promptly sped off, and was supposed
to take a new route to avoid further attempts on his life. Unfortunately, nobody on the duke's security
detail had bothered to tell the Czech-speaking drivers of the change in plans, and suddenly
the Czech driver of the duke's car made a wrong turn, forcing him to stop right in front
of Gavrilo Princip. Astounded at his incredible luck, Princip
took his fateful shot, killing the Archduke and launching into motion the events that
would lead to World War I. Had anybody in the duke's security detail
made the decision to inform the Czech-speaking drivers of the new route, history as we know
it would have been completely rewritten. For starters, it's unlikely that World War
I would have happened when it did. Germany was eager to dethrone Britain as the
ruling global power, but knew that it could not afford to do so until it could match the
power of her mighty fleets. Without the assassination of the Archduke,
Germany would have likely tried to further build its military and economic might to rival
Britain. Without a defeat in World War I, Germany's
Wilhelm II would have remained in power, and Germany would have remained an imperial power. War in Europe would have been inevitable given
friction between Russian communists, Germany's imperialists, and the democracies of Britain
and France, but the war would have started later, and without Hitler's rise to power,
Einstein and the dozens of brilliant Jewish physicists who fled Nazi rule would have likely
remained in Germany and Austria. This would have led to Germany developing
the atomic bomb before the allies, which would have been reason enough to keep the US out
of a European war. The allies would have lost the ensuing world
war, and an imperialistic Germany would have ruled Europe. Today, the UN would not exist, and instead
of a system of strong, liberal democracies leading the world, it would have been an imperial
Germany paving the future of humanity. 2. Lazy politician dooms the Soviet Union and
prevents World War III By 1989 the simmering conflict between the
United States and the Soviet Union was reaching a critical level. President Ronald Reagan had built upon the
international successes of his predecessors and had largely isolated the Soviet Union
from the rest of the world economically. Slowly strangled by a lack of international
trade, the Soviet Bloc countries were all feeling the pinch, and bread lines were common
across the Soviet Union and its communist protectorates. A Revolutionary fervor began to build amongst
the youth, who refused to blindly swallow the propaganda that had been spoon-fed to
their parents. The Soviet Union's leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,
had initiated a system of reforms to ease economic restrictions and boost the economy
of the Union and other eastern bloc nations, yet peaceful protests had already begun to
spread across eastern Europe. In East Germany, massive protests rocked the
nation as the people demanded Gorbachev-style reforms in their own country. In order to appease the citizenry, the government
issued new travel regulations that promised the freedom to travel outside of East Germany-
although buried under the fine print, national security exemptions promised that few if any
East Germans would actually be free to leave the country. On November 9th, the spokesman for the east
German politburo, Guenter Schabowski, held a regularly scheduled press conference. Earlier, he had received a document from the
politburo speaking about the travel regulations and urging him to mention them publicly, though
Schabowski had not had the time to read the document thoroughly and he had never been
involved in discussions about the easing of travel restrictions. The press conference went on as normal and
was completely uneventful, famous American reporter Tom Brokaw described the evening
as “boring”. Towards the end however, an Italian journalist
piped up with a question about the travel regulations, and the question sparked Schabowski's
memory. Having read only brief snippets of the document
he had been handed on the subject, Schabowski mentioned things that had been purely hypothetical
discussion amongst politburo members but that stood out in his memory as significant, namely
the opening of the border and free travel for all citizens. Immediately the room exploded into a frenzy
of questions from the very surprised reporters, with various reporters asking when the regulation
would go into effect. One reporter shouted above the din: “immediately?”. The rattled Schabowski shuffled his papers
nervously and mumbled out a response, “Immediately, right away.” Within minutes the international press was
reporting that East Germany's borders were open to all, and east germans watching illegal
western media broadcasts, began to spread the word amongst themselves. Within hours thousands of East Germans had
swarmed the few guards posted along the Berlin Wall and by 11:30 that night, Germany was
in effect, a reunited country. The Berlin Wall would have ultimately fallen,
and the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc was likely to be inevitable due to a variety of
factors. Yet had Schabowski been a more competent politician,
or at least a more prepared one, the unintentional announcement of the opening of east Germany's
borders would not have led to the quick reunification of Germany that it did, and in turn spur the
revolutionary wave that would ultimately defeat European communism. Gorbachev had promised that he would not use
military power to respond to the political uprisings that were plaguing east europe,
but had East Germany's borders not been inadvertently opened and acted as a release valve for the
revolutionary fervor in eastern europe, it's likely the frustrated revolutionaries would
have resorted to violence. Seeing his own political power fading, and
the Soviet Union along with it, it is not unlikely that Gorbachev would have resorted
to military force which would have inevitably spilled across Europe. Dragged into an accidental war, NATO would
have at last found itself in the war it dreaded most, and in a very dangerous way as it faced
off against a Soviet Union desperate and on the verge of political collapse. With a full-scale war in Europe and the collapse
of political order in the east, control of nuclear weapons would have fallen on generals
emboldened to not seek Kremlin approval for their use. Faced against superior NATO forces and backed
into a desperate corner, many of those generals could have authorized the use of nuclear weapons
against NATO troops, triggering a retaliatory attack from the West. 1. A shortage of paper sets mankind back centuries Archimedes was a Greek genius who is well
known for his accomplishments as a mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Very little is known about his life, instead
he is best known for his many contributions to science and remembered as one of the leading
scientists of ancient history. A brilliant mind, Archimedes would stumble
upon mathematical theorems which would lay the foundation down for modern calculus. At some point in the thirteenth century, his
work on what would lead to integral calculus was copied down in order to be preserved,
but three hundred years later those parchments, carefully safeguarded and preserved in a monastery,
were discovered by an unknown monk who with a single rash decision, set back human progress
by hundreds of years. Needing to copy down some religious texts,
the monk desperately looked for fresh parchment upon which to write on. With no fresh paper to write on available
anywhere in the monastery, the monk selected instead a few pieces of parchment with writing
he did not understand, and then began to scrape the ink off so he could write over it. Unknowingly, the monk was writing over texts
that explained key aspects of calculus, and in the act destroyed information that would
take hundreds of years to rediscover. How would human civilization have changed
if that monk had picked literally any other parchment to write on, or if the monk in charge
of the shopping had stocked up on blank parchment? Well, that's hard to determine, but given
that calculus is used in everything from physics, engineering, economics, statistics, and even
medicine, it's clear that this anonymous monk's very bad decision led to humanity sitting
in the corner with the dunce cap on for centuries to come. Just think about it, mankind might have landed
on the moon in the 1800s, and we could all be enjoying Star Trek-level technology in
our daily lives today! What would the world look like today if the
decisions in this episode had gone another way? Want to hear more about the biggest decisions
that changed the world? Let us know in the comments, and as always
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