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Most Important Moment in Recorded History ?

West Texas CEO

GAF's Nicest Lunch Thief and Nosiest Dildo Archeologist
If you were to name a single action, battle, reform or any kind of decision that affected the known world the most what would it be?

There are so many I could pick, such as the discovery of penicillin, the birth control pill or the Magna Carta, or maybe the printing press; but I choose the Soviet nuclear false alarm incident.

If it wasn't for Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, who was the duty officer who just happened to be on duty on September 26, 1983 at the Oko nuclear early-warning system, then a nuclear war would've broken out. He saw that a missile had been launched from the USA, followed by up to five others, and immediately called BS on it. His reasoning was that, if the USA was going to really attack, they'd launch a hell of a lot more missiles than just up to six. Guessing correctly that it was a bug in the computer he went against Soviet protocol, ignored direct commands, and did not issue a retaliatory order to Moscow.

Analysts thought that if he had in fact issued the order then the Soviet leadership, faced with only minutes to react, would've almost certainly launched the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal at the USA and NATO and its allies. If anyone else had been on duty except for this guy, who was a civilian employee tasked with maintaining the system, then they would've been military personnel who would've 100% responded to Moscow with the news of an attack. The inevitable response against Russia would've resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, devastated North America and Europe, and turned the earth into a radioactive cinder. But he happened to be the one on duty that day.

He received no commendation for his action, and was removed from his post, suffered a nervous breakdown, and the whole matter was swept under the rug by the Soviets embarrassed at the failure of the early-warning detection system. We found out about it only after the fall of the Soviet State, when he published his memoirs in 1998. I consider his action at averting what would've been World War III to be the single most important moment in recorded history.
 
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Dark Star

Member
DifferentUnrulyHorse-size_restricted.gif
 

morelan

Member
Even though I'm not religious and this is kind of a cliché, the birth of Jesus has to be one of the most important. There are so many actions and ideas in our history that are tied to the consequences of this event. Unlike the OP's example, the world would not have ended had this not happened, but still, it's so influential that it's very hard to imagine how the world would be without it (culturally, socially, tecnologically etc.).

However, I think my example consists more in a chain of events (the life of Jesus) than a single event, and I can't think of a single event that would be more important than the OP's.
 

Lrnex

Member
Even though I'm not religious and this is kind of a cliché, the birth of Jesus has to be one of the most important. There are so many actions and ideas in our history that are tied to the consequences of this event.
To add to this, the conversion of Constantine and with that the rapid spread and acceptance of Christianity throughout the Roman world. I’m sure there were other factors at play that contributed, but before Constantine Christianity was just a weird Jewish cult that was kept in the shadows and only sometimes tolerated. Without his conversion the faith could well have died off and we could have had a wildly different western history and culture.
 

farmerboy

Member
Even though I'm not religious and this is kind of a cliché, the birth of Jesus has to be one of the most important. There are so many actions and ideas in our history that are tied to the consequences of this event. Unlike the OP's example, the world would not have ended had this not happened, but still, it's so influential that it's very hard to imagine how the world would be without it (culturally, socially, tecnologically etc.).

However, I think my example consists more in a chain of events (the life of Jesus) than a single event, and I can't think of a single event that would be more important than the OP's.

Sermon on the Mount, one of the greatest speeches ever made.
 

DKehoe

Member
Gavrilo Princip assassinating Archduke Ferdinand. Arguably every bad thing that happened since then, was the result of this. He changed the world forever.

This is what first came to mind for me too. If Princip doesn’t kill Ferdinand then no WW1, so no WW2, so no Cold War, so Russia doesn’t invade Afghanistan, so no 9/11 etc. You can draw a direct line between it and so many things.

Ferdinand dying was what broke the dam of tensions to kick of WW1. In hindsight it seems inevitable it would have happened but that’s not necessarily the case. If the Cold War had broken out into open, direct hostility we’d be saying how that was inevitable. But that spark to light the fuse might never come and so tensions die down.
 

Self

Member
The first thing I though about was the atomic bomb. But the first videogame 'tennis for two' was invented while working on the bomb.

So it must be videogames, right?
 
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