[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Times the world has dodged a bullet
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       Ask HN: Times the world has dodged a bullet
        
       I sometimes find myself frustrated, looking at ways history turned
       on a tiny unlucky break, resulting in things being, from my
       perspective, significantly worse than they otherwise might have
       been but for a bit of bad luck.  I was thinking it might be helpful
       to consider cases of the opposite, when we got lucky and maybe I
       don't even realize it, since we wouldn't necessarily spend a lot of
       time thinking about, or even necessarily be aware of, a bad thing
       that merely _almost_ happened. (Or even more so, a good thing that
       never did.)  The most obvious examples are the two instances of
       possibly averted nuclear war: Vasily Arkhipov blocking the launch
       of a nuclear strike from a Soviet sub during the Cuban missile
       crisis, and Stanislav Petrov choosing not to report an apparent
       missile launch from the US in the (correct) belief that it was a
       false alarm.  Are there any others that come to mind? I suppose
       someone with a very different belief system than mine might count
       some of my unlucky happenings instead as lucky ones, but are there
       any other reasonably objective ones? Discoveries made by chance
       that likely would not have been made for a long time otherwise?
       Wars narrowly averted? Other sorts of positive events I'm not even
       considering?  As a final aside, this wasn't in my mind when I
       started writing, but I'm now reminded of the Apple TV series For
       All Mankind. While it's obviously fiction and takes a lot of
       liberties, I think it does pretty well at showing how significantly
       history might be altered by individual events.
        
       Author : tempestn
       Score  : 5 points
       Date   : 2025-09-24 21:57 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | tempestn wrote:
       | One other one that just came to mind is the Chernobyl disaster.
       | Obviously it was still a disaster (it's in the name!), but if I
       | recall correctly, there was a water reservoir below the meltdown,
       | which if reached (and I think it came close?) would likely have
       | caused an explosion that would have spread enough radiation to
       | make much of eastern Europe uninhabitable, among other disastrous
       | effects. That's quite a dodged bullet.
        
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       (page generated 2025-09-24 23:01 UTC)