The metaphorical “what if we killed Hitler before he became Hitler”
In studying history, we are restricted by practicality to study only such things that concretely happened. Surely this leads to something like survivorship bias, so we could be placing undue scientific emphasis on things which were unlikely given material conditions, yet occurred nonetheless.
Therefore some level of speculation is necessary I think, in order to learn from the things which went right due to the non-occurrence of events. Like the eternal dilemma of system admins, the proof of their usefulness is nothing happening, things not breaking, which in turn appears as proof that they were unnecessary in the first place.
Best I can come up with is the handful of averted nuclear deployments during the Cold War, but those are fairly well known.
You never hear about murder hornets in the usa bc the department of agriculture hunted down and killed all of them.
Yeah. Mosquitoe control is iffy bc it mostly involves draining swamps and spraying vast amounts of insecticide. Both are good for humans no dying of malaria and dengue and stuff, but very bad for the environment on every level.
There have been some goofy attempts at things like breeding huge numbers of sterile male mosquitoes to try to cause population collapse when the mosquitoes breed and don't produce viable offspring. On a smaller level you can sometimes buy pucks of some kind of nematode or bacteria that devour mosquitoe eggs and larva if you've got a pond or something. There have been some fairly silly attempts to make little lasers that spot mosquitoes and burn their wings off.
some kind of nematode or bacteria that devour mosquitoe eggs and larva
the wee crustaceans in new york public water are meant to do that as well
There was that Gates Foundation program in South America that attempted those genetic modifications and all of a sudden you had Zika exploding around the same regions. Coincidence? Maaaybe.
The Carrington Event occurred before usage of electricity was so ubiquitous. If a coronal mass ejection of that size or larger were to happen now, large sections of the planet could be without power for weeks. Given how dependent we are on electricity, that could lead to a societal collapse.
Ooh the wiki page also mentions a July 2012 solar storm that was Carrington level but just missed hitting the Earth in orbit. Another good contender for this thread.
Look up the work of Norman Borlaug. In the 1940s through the 1960s he developed and spread high-yield agricultural techniques and crop varieties. He travelled to some of the poorest most underdeveloped countries to share his knowledge and increase the yields of farmers there.
In the early 1900s many scientists and other figures had been convinced we were facing a looming Malthusian crisis in which millions would simply starve. Norman Borlaug effectively averted that crisis for countless millions of people worldwide.
There was that one time the Soviet early warning system malfunctioned but some brave comrades chose not to launch.
Or that one time that a plane crash almost nuked North Carolina.
Essentially if the many worlds hypothesis is correct, the multiverse is littered with the charred remnants of mid-century Earths where luck didn't go our way.
The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash would have totally prompted a "retaliation" strike from
if the bombs went off, wouldn't it?
The preparedness paradox is something we run into a lot these days, and is related to your question. When you avert a crisis people will inevitably point and say “See, nothing happened! You wasted all that time, money, and effort for nothing!” Our collective Covid response was an example, the vaccines and lockdowns were demonstrably effective in reducing deaths and yet millions who were merely personally inconvenienced insist it was all a waste of time.
As far as big “smoking gun” examples of narrowly averted disasters it will probably be hard to find many good examples, because as you said historians tend not to write about things that didn’t happen.
That being said, some of them absolutely love to speculate on alternate scenarios, and there is no lack of examples of crises or events that were not averted, but we can point directly at actions people took that prevented the situation from being even worse than it was.
The final Tsar's grandfather died in a train crash because he was blind drunk and made the engineer go faster and faster until it derailed. Probably accelerated the fall of the Russian empire a little bit.
Yeah. A lot of work went into fixing the problem so it could be a non-problem.
Not a specific event or policy, more a broad institution of the ancient world (it’s codified in the Bible), but I’d argue that the practice of the debt jubilee averted crises. Both in that the discharging of debts acted as a release valve for the underclasses, but more importantly that they prevented any one debt collector or issuer of debt from amassing too much economic, and ergo political, power. So there was likely a lot of strife, power grabs, violence, etc., that was avoided because of those regular erasure of debts.
The Acadian Expulsion. Brits doing ethnic cleansing of francophones on Canada's east coast.
Oh crap, my brain ignored the "avoided" part this morning. I blame a lack of caffeine at the time.
