I mostly agree but as a counterpoint, there have been a good handful of times in the Cold War where a single person had to choose whether to launch the nukes based on false positives, and simply chose not to.

If there was any evidence for time travel, it would be the fact that no nukes were fired during the Cold War due to a lot of close calls. Honestly the fact no nukes have ever been used in a conflict after Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also improbable.

You claim to know how time travel works in the real world?

Don't believe you until you show me your time machine.

No, someone else might have done it. There is literally no way to know.

Perhaps if one went all the way back to our ancestors and murdered a perfectly innocent fish.

Though I do wonder what kind of cascading effects there would be to eliminating Mussolini from history.

Perhaps the real infanticide is the friends we made along the way

The bitter European state rivalry also lead to industrialization. The particular sequence of necessary things like a shortage of expensive labour, wet coal that needed constant pumping, an arms race with other European powers (Whitworth rifles, screw threads, standardization, his micrometer, boring breakthroughs. Uh, I mean boring as in hole boring) and then finally the Newcommen steam engine which was truly revolutionary but was also utter shit.

James Watt's improvement of the Newcommen engine sparked the steam era. Also with heavy machinery we got the Bessemer process for mass steel making that was good enough. Puddling furnaces or crucible steel were something you did if you needed better control.

All of that shit was to spite the French. And the Spanish. And the Germans. And the Italians probably, maybe even the Greeks? Who knows. It was these interstate rivalries that created a tech arms race and now we are where we are.

Most individuals, sure. There's an argument to be made that Taft royally screwed the 20th century by not conceding the primary to Teddy. If he had stepped aside, Wilson cannot win the presidency. Without Wilson keeping us out of WWI, Teddy likely gets Congress to declare war after the sinking of The Lucitania. That gets us into the war quickly enough that Russia doesn't pull out. Sure the Tsar is still gonna get overthrown, but the interim government won't be, as they just helped win the war, and so Russia is at the table when Armisice Day (or the equivalent) happens. That prevents Russia from losing territory. Here's where it gets interesting. Without the purge of the interim government, the Bolsheviks don't have the momentum to purge the Menchaviks, making communism more moderate and preventing Lenin, and therefore Stalin from rising to power. Without Stalin yelling that he intended to kill all non-communists, Germany probably doesn't go full fascist. In fact the European theater of WWII might just not have happened. Sure the baltics are still a thing, and the Pacific still exists, and we probably still would have cut Japan's oil supply, but we wouldn't have been distracted in Europe.

It's entirely possible that without Wilson, the US wouldn't have ever gained the superpower status we got after WWII.

go further back, kill alexander the great no HRE, none of their bastard splinter empires, we all end up speaking mongolian cause the Khan faces far kess resistance invading europe

If anything, Hitler cemented that fascist rule was a bad thing since he also carried around the baggage of intense racism.

Seems like fascism was reasonably well received by the world of interwar period (at least in the west). Its primarily because they Nazis did a genocide that we associate fascism with "the big bad" in modern times.

I don't doubt that the Weimar Republic was headed to fascism, but if they'd had a more rational leader, it would probably have been a slower/steadier boil that didn't kick off WWII for a few extra years + was more content to rest on its laurels (i.e. content with dividing Poland, taking the Sudetenland, etc) with significant breaks between claims.

I think this all culminates in a more sympathetic looking Germany post WWII (if it even becomes a World War), which then changes the dynamic of modern Neo-Nazi movements (probably less racist, less overlap with confederate sympathizer movements, more political reformation focused).

Idk, its interesting to think about.

If WWII never happened, the US never would have built up bases all over the world nor would they have been able to get the head start on pushing American manufacturing standards as ISO standards (due to being physically removed from the conflict in Europe). In that case, the US never sees the boom that it did from those situations, and never would have nearly as much economic, military, or social power as it did from being involved in the war.

How they would manage to take over all of north and south America in that situation is beyond me. Clearly written by someone who believes in American exceptionalism

LOL, America's Hat doesn't count as a real separate country, silly!

Hello, is this England? Yes, it's me, a time traveler. Would you be terribly put off if I asked you to be friends with Germany? I know they've been quite cantankerous of late, but I promise it's in the best interest of all parties for you two to get along. Cheerio!

Now, where did I put the phone numbers for France and Belgium...

Genau, wäre vielleicht nicht verkehrt, wenn wir alle Deutsch sprechen würden :)

Convincing the allies to be sympathetic to Germany after WWI would be really hard. While the US had Wilson trying to establish cooperation with the League of Nations, he had to compromise with others who wanted more punitive measures. France had long-standing ire with them over Alsace-Lorraine and wanted them permanently crippled, since their shared border made them a looming threat in the future. They also suffered a lot of damage and needed aid themselves. Britain's attitude was kind of in between. Plenty of people guessed the treaty could lead to another war in the future, but many were too angry to really care. So we got stuff like the war guilt clause.

A professor in college told me Hitler went from about the normal amount of racist to turbo racist after having some chemicals leak into his brain near the end of WWI. So Hitler's racism might have been a symptom of actual brain damage. Either way, racism and conspiracies don't tend to come from a rational position so it is very hard to pull someone out of them with reason.

I doubt Israel would exist without Hitler but there would still likely be some conflict in the region. Britain made the Balfour Declaration before WWI had even ended and the collapse of the Ottomans Empire that controlled the region left it unstable and in British control. They would have supported the jewish minority in the region even without the Holocaust available to help them justify creating a new state.

*walk