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There would actually be no need to kill anybody in order to prevent WW1 and WW2 (at least as we know it) you'd simply need to tell a taxi driver to take a diffe

There would actually be no need to kill anybody in order to prevent WW1 and WW2 (at least as we know it) you'd simply need to tell a taxi driver to take a different path, and all would be well: "But Franz was not yet done putting his life in insane danger. Against the advice of pretty much everyone, he insisted on going to the hospital to visit the people who were injured by the grenade. The driver, unfortunately, had no idea where the fuck he was going. They ended up crisscrossing hilariously through the streets of Sarajevo, until they just randomly happened to pass a cafe where, you guessed it, Gavrilo Princip was enjoying a post-failed-assassination sandwich. After the obligatory pause of dumbfounded luck, Princip grabbed his pistol and turned the tide of history." http://www.cracked.com/article_17298_6-random-coincidences-that-created-modern-world.html http://www.cracked.com/article_17298_6-random-coincidences-t...

yoha 13y ago
When you consider alternate past timelines, you have to choose some model: is space-time elastic so that a change will be automatically fixed gradually through time? is causation effective immediately, leading to possible paradoxes (killing your parents)? are you actually making a branch? Well, if we consider the last choice (which, I think, is the more convenient for speculating), you would still have a World War because this event was more of a pretext since there were already a lot of political tension. Moreover, the alliances which made the war global were already in place and would lead to WW1 even with another trigger. That say, you can also consider the Butterfly Effect meaning that changing the trigger could finally change a lot of things after some time. Maybe Hitler (or his substitute) would have listened to his adviser, or he would have declared war with USSR, or Manhattan Project would have failed, and so on. tl;dr: if we are to rewrite history, let us do it all the way!
levosmetalo 13y ago
Small nitpick: please don't spread the misconception that Gavrilo Princip killing chief commander of occupying army who wanted to show off by visiting occupied territories somehow started the world war. It would have started anyways since the balance of powers was way off.
- _ak 13y ago
  Bosnia Herzegovina wasn't "occupied" in any way and it belonging to Austria-Hungary was recognized by all European powers, including Serbia, and thus legal under then international law. A limited war against Serbia following the assassination was thus justified, but Austria hadn't considered the "chain" of allied countries assisting each other extending the conflict to basically all of Europe, plus the Germans used it as justification to finally implement 30, 40 year old plans to wage war on basically everyone else around them. tl;dr it's complicated.
  - vasac 13y ago
    Bosnia and Herzegovina was occupied (no need for quotation marks). It doesn't matter who recognized occupation - it was still an occupation. It wasn't welcomed by Serbs in Bosnia (they didn't start rebelion just to replace one occupying force with another one), it wasn't welcomed by Bosnian Muslims. There were no Austrians or Hungarians in Bosnia and there were no reasons why Bosnia should become part of AH Empire.
    - userulluipeste 13y ago
      I agree with all but the last sentence. The ethnicity may be considered as constituency warrant for a national state, not for an empire. Usually empires don't have any warrant for their existence but the power through which are maintained.
  - nzp 13y ago
    > but Austria hadn't considered the "chain" of allied countries assisting each other How could it not consider such a, ahem, small detail?
  - levosmetalo 13y ago
    So, if an emperor has a right to take country by force, why not grant the same right to inhabitants of that same country to free themselves by force? Besides, how any sane person can find justifying attacking one small neighboring country and killing one third of its male population and committing such atrocities against humanity just to "revenge" the death of one person, for which Serbia wasn't even responsible. After all, if Bosnia was really legitimate part of AH empire, as opposed to occupied country, then why attack Serbia because one AH citizen killed another one. Seems like blaming the victim, since Serbia was clearly the biggest victim of WW1. As you already said, one Bosnian Serb (which btw declared himself as Yugoslavian, like many members of his Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) organization) kills one tyrant, then AH and Germany attack half of the Europe, and Serbia and Gavrilo Princip are guilt of WW1? Makes no sense to me.
Sharlin 13y ago
Although a lone gunman single-handedly starting the bloodiest war in the history of humankind makes for a nice just-so story, in reality things are more complex. Europe was a ticking time bomb at the time; just like Hitler personally didn't cause the second world war, Gavrilo Princip hardly did the first one.
tga_d 13y ago
While it smacks in the face of the joke I made elsewhere, altering the events of that day probably wouldn't have had that much effect on the over-arching tides of history. Pretty much everyone agrees that Europe was a proverbial powder keg at the time, and that all sides (at least in and around Europe) were itching for an excuse to go to war. This is a relatively popular subject to study in history, in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I While there is some argument to be made that the specific timing of the event made subsequent happenings occur in the manner they did, I think most people would say that what happened was going to happen anyway. Or at least, this is what I recall from high school history class and my own limited research into the subject. Still though, it's fun to speculate - a sufficient delay in the causes of revolution in Russia could have correspondingly delayed the backlash against communism, Germany could very well have been the first country to undergo such a revolution, the style of communism then being more akin to classical Marxism than Lenin's, perhaps lessening Germany's role as an industrial powerhouse and colonial ruler, mitigating the competitive tensions in Europe on that front but increasing them on an economic one, or who knows what. Really it's all just counterfactual conjecture, but like I said, it's fun.
- jsnell 13y ago
  I don't think pretty much everyone agrees. I went on a WWI reading binge earlier this year, and of the 4 books on the war written in this millennium, none described a general European war as unavoidable. There had been major crises in the previous few years that didn't lead to one. And while the trend had been for increased polarization, there was good reason to believe that the tide was turning. France was a month away from getting a pacifist government that was looking to patch things up with Germany (and would've had one by the time of crisis, except for by a freak occurence in the form of the Caillaux affair). Russia was losing their shot on Constantinople at the end of that summer, when the Turkish Dreadnaughts would've been delivered. In Austria-Hungary Franz Ferdinand was the main driver for peace, and the main warmonger (Conrad )was about to be sacked. England was likely to detach itself from Russia when the next round of treaty negotiations over Persia came up. Germans were convinced that a war against Russia would be unwinnable in a couple of years. So there's some reason to believe that the time window for a general European war was fairly short, and it was only by bad luck that something sufficiently serious happened in that window.
bazinga123 13y ago
if there were no hippies, we would never have Steve jobs; no ipod; no iphone; google would have come out with a nexus with a physical keyboard. we would never have apps etc etc.. oO
- walshemj 13y ago
  I have an old rio mp3 player which predates the ipod by years
NAFV_P 13y ago
I thought the Europeans had been at each other's throats for around three hundred years. In Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, he argues that the technological innovations of Europe during the enlightenment were partially due to intense competition and wars. He compared it to China, which by 1350 was highly advanced, but had a more homogeneous political structure, suggesting less competition.
- mcv 13y ago
  > I thought the Europeans had been at each other's throats for around three hundred years. Three hundred? More like two thousand. In the late middle ages a war could last 30, 80 or 114 years. There was always some sort of armed conflict somewhere in Europe. The peace we've seen post-WW2 is pretty unique.
  - NAFV_P 13y ago
    > Three hundred? More like two thousand. Yeah, bang on. > The peace we've seen post-WW2 is pretty unique. I had a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#1st.E2.80.9310th_century_AD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#1st... It looks like it never stopped. I counted 101 conflicts since 1900 up to the present day, I'm currently counting for the previous centuries. 19th - 51 18th - 42 17th - 41 16th - 59 15th - 59 ... I've lost count.
deletes 13y ago
Please don't link cracked.com articles. They are written in a primitive and insulting style. Here is wiki instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz...
Shorel 13y ago
On the other hand, stopping Einstein from writing the letter to encourage the Atomic Bomb research would have really prevented all Atomic Weapons and the Cold War.

yoha 13y ago

When you consider alternate past timelines, you have to choose some model: is space-time elastic so that a change will be automatically fixed gradually through time? is causation effective immediately, leading to possible paradoxes (killing your parents)? are you actually making a branch? Well, if we consider the last choice (which, I think, is the more convenient for speculating), you would still have a World War because this event was more of a pretext since there were already a lot of political tension. Moreover, the alliances which made the war global were already in place and would lead to WW1 even with another trigger. That say, you can also consider the Butterfly Effect meaning that changing the trigger could finally change a lot of things after some time. Maybe Hitler (or his substitute) would have listened to his adviser, or he would have declared war with USSR, or Manhattan Project would have failed, and so on. tl;dr: if we are to rewrite history, let us do it all the way!

levosmetalo 13y ago

Small nitpick: please don't spread the misconception that Gavrilo Princip killing chief commander of occupying army who wanted to show off by visiting occupied territories somehow started the world war. It would have started anyways since the balance of powers was way off.

_ak 13y ago
Bosnia Herzegovina wasn't "occupied" in any way and it belonging to Austria-Hungary was recognized by all European powers, including Serbia, and thus legal under then international law. A limited war against Serbia following the assassination was thus justified, but Austria hadn't considered the "chain" of allied countries assisting each other extending the conflict to basically all of Europe, plus the Germans used it as justification to finally implement 30, 40 year old plans to wage war on basically everyone else around them. tl;dr it's complicated.
- vasac 13y ago
  Bosnia and Herzegovina was occupied (no need for quotation marks). It doesn't matter who recognized occupation - it was still an occupation. It wasn't welcomed by Serbs in Bosnia (they didn't start rebelion just to replace one occupying force with another one), it wasn't welcomed by Bosnian Muslims. There were no Austrians or Hungarians in Bosnia and there were no reasons why Bosnia should become part of AH Empire.
  - userulluipeste 13y ago
    I agree with all but the last sentence. The ethnicity may be considered as constituency warrant for a national state, not for an empire. Usually empires don't have any warrant for their existence but the power through which are maintained.
- nzp 13y ago
  > but Austria hadn't considered the "chain" of allied countries assisting each other How could it not consider such a, ahem, small detail?
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  So, if an emperor has a right to take country by force, why not grant the same right to inhabitants of that same country to free themselves by force? Besides, how any sane person can find justifying attacking one small neighboring country and killing one third of its male population and committing such atrocities against humanity just to "revenge" the death of one person, for which Serbia wasn't even responsible. After all, if Bosnia was really legitimate part of AH empire, as opposed to occupied country, then why attack Serbia because one AH citizen killed another one. Seems like blaming the victim, since Serbia was clearly the biggest victim of WW1. As you already said, one Bosnian Serb (which btw declared himself as Yugoslavian, like many members of his Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) organization) kills one tyrant, then AH and Germany attack half of the Europe, and Serbia and Gavrilo Princip are guilt of WW1? Makes no sense to me.

Sharlin 13y ago

Although a lone gunman single-handedly starting the bloodiest war in the history of humankind makes for a nice just-so story, in reality things are more complex. Europe was a ticking time bomb at the time; just like Hitler personally didn't cause the second world war, Gavrilo Princip hardly did the first one.

tga_d 13y ago

While it smacks in the face of the joke I made elsewhere, altering the events of that day probably wouldn't have had that much effect on the over-arching tides of history. Pretty much everyone agrees that Europe was a proverbial powder keg at the time, and that all sides (at least in and around Europe) were itching for an excuse to go to war. This is a relatively popular subject to study in history, in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I While there is some argument to be made that the specific timing of the event made subsequent happenings occur in the manner they did, I think most people would say that what happened was going to happen anyway. Or at least, this is what I recall from high school history class and my own limited research into the subject. Still though, it's fun to speculate - a sufficient delay in the causes of revolution in Russia could have correspondingly delayed the backlash against communism, Germany could very well have been the first country to undergo such a revolution, the style of communism then being more akin to classical Marxism than Lenin's, perhaps lessening Germany's role as an industrial powerhouse and colonial ruler, mitigating the competitive tensions in Europe on that front but increasing them on an economic one, or who knows what. Really it's all just counterfactual conjecture, but like I said, it's fun.

jsnell 13y ago
I don't think pretty much everyone agrees. I went on a WWI reading binge earlier this year, and of the 4 books on the war written in this millennium, none described a general European war as unavoidable. There had been major crises in the previous few years that didn't lead to one. And while the trend had been for increased polarization, there was good reason to believe that the tide was turning. France was a month away from getting a pacifist government that was looking to patch things up with Germany (and would've had one by the time of crisis, except for by a freak occurence in the form of the Caillaux affair). Russia was losing their shot on Constantinople at the end of that summer, when the Turkish Dreadnaughts would've been delivered. In Austria-Hungary Franz Ferdinand was the main driver for peace, and the main warmonger (Conrad )was about to be sacked. England was likely to detach itself from Russia when the next round of treaty negotiations over Persia came up. Germans were convinced that a war against Russia would be unwinnable in a couple of years. So there's some reason to believe that the time window for a general European war was fairly short, and it was only by bad luck that something sufficiently serious happened in that window.

bazinga123 13y ago

if there were no hippies, we would never have Steve jobs; no ipod; no iphone; google would have come out with a nexus with a physical keyboard. we would never have apps etc etc.. oO

walshemj 13y ago
I have an old rio mp3 player which predates the ipod by years

NAFV_P 13y ago

I thought the Europeans had been at each other's throats for around three hundred years. In Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, he argues that the technological innovations of Europe during the enlightenment were partially due to intense competition and wars. He compared it to China, which by 1350 was highly advanced, but had a more homogeneous political structure, suggesting less competition.

mcv 13y ago
> I thought the Europeans had been at each other's throats for around three hundred years. Three hundred? More like two thousand. In the late middle ages a war could last 30, 80 or 114 years. There was always some sort of armed conflict somewhere in Europe. The peace we've seen post-WW2 is pretty unique.
- NAFV_P 13y ago
  > Three hundred? More like two thousand. Yeah, bang on. > The peace we've seen post-WW2 is pretty unique. I had a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#1st.E2.80.9310th_century_AD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#1st... It looks like it never stopped. I counted 101 conflicts since 1900 up to the present day, I'm currently counting for the previous centuries. 19th - 51 18th - 42 17th - 41 16th - 59 15th - 59 ... I've lost count.

deletes 13y ago

Please don't link cracked.com articles. They are written in a primitive and insulting style. Here is wiki instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz...

Shorel 13y ago

On the other hand, stopping Einstein from writing the letter to encourage the Atomic Bomb research would have really prevented all Atomic Weapons and the Cold War.