world changing events and alternate realities

[Tundra]

What world changing events can you think of happening (or, not happening) or happening in a different way, that would change how the world is today, even slightly? They have to be plausible for not happening. So instead of like "Hitler was never born/died in the first world war" it'd h ave to be something like, someone else took the place of Hitler in history, maybe some other party that you know of, or another Nazi leader... and what effects can you imagine it having?

[merrihart]

The big ones are, of course, the world wars, the whole Stalin/Yeltzin thing, China not becoming democratic (yes, this was possible, even plausible), etc.

Not so big...what if the LIberty bell never cracked?
What if the "Big Quake" happened in 1974?
What if Mount St. Helens had never blown up?
What if the Russians still owned Alaska? The French, Louisianna? The Mexicans, Texas?
What if the Empire State Building had never gotten finished?
What if the Statue of LIberty had not been renovated and continued to sink and fall into disrepair?
What if Marilyn Monroe had not died? or not died naked?
What if JKF had never been shot?

There's alot of what ifs that could change the nature of our current time line.

[Tundra]

What points could those things *not* have happened though? That's sort of what I'm asking as well. Or, how it could have happened differently. For this, I can't just be like 'well, what if world war 1 never happened', because i'd need to figure out why it didn't happen, or what happened instead, because there was a lot of stuff building up to it.
But thanks for the list, i'll try to look up ways it could have happened differently.

[Tundra]

Any ideas...

[felixia]

how about, what if the printing press was not found? I think it was from china (before that, i think all books were handwritten and it took years or asomething...well, for the bible it did : P), so what if it were discovered later, or sooner?
Um...what if tea didn't come out from china? I heard they drank alcohol before they had nice, refined tea in England : D
WHAT if Tasmania were still attached to Australia?! Would we all be inbred?! (don't take the one seriously hehe)

What about Mao Zedong and those other probably-important figures in China's communist history? If they had kept their power for longer, or if they had never got China in the first place? (As I understand it, before Comm. and such came in, their life expectancy was much lower, and their living standards were too. It's different now. How could these changed have happened differently?
Forgive me if I said somethings stupid up there, I didn't do well in history!)
Also, what if it were China, instead of America? My history teacher said they were the next world superpower. What if they already were?

Um...that's all I can think of I'm afraid. I was trying to think back to my history class ^_^ I guess I didn't get much!

[MichaelB]

Recently? what if the terrorists had failed at that crucial moment and the World Trade Center towers never collapsed?

[sibilatorix]

- Had the US not dropped the A-Bombs on Japan, there would have been a display of strength (i.e. bombing an uninhabited island) and/or an attack on the Japanese mainland. The Japanese had 1 million troops prepared, while the US could send 700,000 and 500,000 deaths were expected. There was actually quite a bit of debate on the issue, some from the scientists who developed the technology but didn't want it used in warfare.

The only other think I can think of off the top of my head is the development of calculus (Did Leibniz work it out on his own or just copy Newton?) but that isn't exactly world-changing. Unless you have a particular interest in the world of late 1600s mathematics?