Ask HN: Times the world has dodged a bullet | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Times the world has dodged a bullet

17 pointstempestn19 comments

I sometimes find myself frustrated, looking at ways history turned on a tiny unlucky break, resulting in things being, from my perspective, significantly worse than they otherwise might have been but for a bit of bad luck.

I was thinking it might be helpful to consider cases of the opposite, when we got lucky and maybe I don't even realize it, since we wouldn't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about, or even necessarily be aware of, a bad thing that merely almost happened. (Or even more so, a good thing that never did.)

The most obvious examples are the two instances of possibly averted nuclear war: Vasily Arkhipov blocking the launch of a nuclear strike from a Soviet sub during the Cuban missile crisis, and Stanislav Petrov choosing not to report an apparent missile launch from the US in the (correct) belief that it was a false alarm.

Are there any others that come to mind? I suppose someone with a very different belief system than mine might count some of my unlucky happenings instead as lucky ones, but are there any other reasonably objective ones? Discoveries made by chance that likely would not have been made for a long time otherwise? Wars narrowly averted? Other sorts of positive events I'm not even considering?

As a final aside, this wasn't in my mind when I started writing, but I'm now reminded of the Apple TV series For All Mankind. While it's obviously fiction and takes a lot of liberties, I think it does pretty well at showing how significantly history might be altered by individual events.

One other one that just came to mind is the Chernobyl disaster. Obviously it was still a disaster (it's in the name!), but if I recall correctly, there was a water reservoir below the meltdown, which if reached (and I think it came close?) would likely have caused an explosion that would have spread enough radiation to make much of eastern Europe uninhabitable, among other disastrous effects. That's quite a dodged bullet.

> human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

That's wild. How would a population of 1000ish survive for that long without growing or going extinct?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...:

“On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the Soviet nuclear early warning system Oko reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from the United States. These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by Stanislav Petrov, an engineer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces on duty at the command center of the early-warning system. He decided to wait for corroborating evidence—of which none arrived—rather than immediately relaying the warning up the chain of command. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States and its NATO allies, which would likely have resulted in a full-scale nuclear war. Investigation of the satellite warning system later determined that the system had indeed malfunctioned.”

I bet this question would also get a lot of fun answers on the AskHistorians subreddit.

Someone (OP it's your question) should post this question there.

Done!

And removed because they don't allow "hypothetical questions".

:(

HIV being relatively intransmissible.

I don’t know the biodynamics of a virus with its case fatality rate and latency period being susceptible to airborne transmission, but if it had been…

I have often thought about the timing of HIV's emergence.

Retroviruses were discovered only a few years before the first AIDS cases. The molecular amplification technologies that form the basis of HIV testing were only developed in the 1970s. The first antivirals that worked against HIV had been developed to treat other retroviruses, just a few years before, too.

If it had emerged in the early 20th century, there would have been no tests for it and no treatments for it. It would have been impossible to control. (We don't do a very good job of it even with all the tools we have now.)

The discovery of penicillin in dirty petris that had been left out over vacation:

https://time.com/4049403/alexander-fleming-history/

I wonder how much later antibiotics would have been discovered if not for that.

It took thousands of years for people to discover agriculture. Eventually they all do or they get assimilated by the ones who do. But I think this might have taken a very, very long time as well.

Stanislav Petrov

Your heart is in the right place, and Stanislav Petrov deserves all of our respect. However, the reality is more complicated. Due to geography, USSR used a system called dead hand [0] to detect a nuclear attack and to retaliate. In particular, SLBMs launched by US off the coast of Norway needed only 5 minutes travel time to Moscow. Similarly, US Pershing missiles stationed in West Germany required about 6-7 minutes to reach Moscow. All of these meant USSR required a nuclear retaliatory system that could prevent hasty decisions. Hence Dead Hand system.

On the other hand, Vasily Arkhipov probably stopped a nuclear war in Oct 1962 [1]...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov

I just finished Hot Zone by Richard Preston, which is about some of the origins of Ebola and an example case of potential disaster being thwarted by the hair of our chin. Fun read.

The Battle of Vienna

The Battle of Plataea

Hitler didn't get the nuke.

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