What one little change to reality would make for a compelling what if scenario?

I know it's a weird and open ended question so I'll start.

I would love to see a hypothetical world where gun-powder is just not a thing, I don't think modern bullets use it but I feel like if gunpowder just never had any explosive properties, it would have been a lot harder for our Chinese and Western progenitors to get to where we are now with modern firearms.

What I'm trying to say is, what would modern warfare look like in a world without firearms?

What if neanderthals weren't murked by their homosapien cousins?

@killianduclark: Like, if they had the same cognitive levels? Heck if I know, peep. It'd be interesting to see how they would look in modern times. Maybe racial divides would have evolved along those lines, like how everyone: black, white, hispanic, asian, etc were united in fear against the Apes in the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. The presence of a more distant other tends to define racial division.

What if Chicxulub asteroid missed?

They weren’t. We just out-paced them in population growth and they got assimilated into our population.

There’s no evidence that their cognitive levels were below that of a human’s.

@zetsu-san:

Okay. Thanks for the correction

What If...Silvie didn't kill niceguy Kang?

@diydeath: I think he means for IRL lol, but yea that’s what I thought we’d be talking about when I clicked on this thread.

@zetsu-san:I know nothing on the subject other than that they probably didn't make it, interesting to know, thx

what if humans had no brains?

@akztemp: The dino-asteroid, right?

Scary answer, maybe our ancestors wouldn't have survived the competition and the dinos would have obtained sentience.

Exciting answer, Dinotopia.

They kind of did make it though, their genes are still around, it's just really really heavily diluted.

What If Obama wasn't black?

What if the Bubonic plague never happened ?

@ccbm2208: I can still see him getting elected, personally. It's not like african-american populations have ever needed extra convincing to vote blue, and his public persona was very agreeable and pleasant. I just don't think he would have been as much of a darling to the media. They would have done their job and given him some extra leeway, but I don't see the cult of personality blossoming around him like in our timeline.

To be fair though, is his wife still black in your timeline? He might still get a lot of that media love if his was the first interracial first family.

@supermanwin1875: Nice. Wages soared in the years following the plague due to the labor shortage and surviving craftsmen would soon join a kind of proto-middle class. Would the Renaissance have even occurred, would it have happened so soon? So many things changed because of the BP, and Europe was never the same.

Personally, as unimaginably horrific as it was, I think the Black Plague and the suffering it caused was Europe's rite of passage. They recovered from this so spectacularly and once population levels had returned to pre-plague levels ushered in one of the most pivotal periods in human history. I personally don't see the incentive for that kind of change in your plague-free timeline. I think Europe would have eventually become what it did, but much more slowly.