Are there any truly "disposable" moments of history?

[Diable Rouge]

Science fiction regularly invokes the time travel hypothesis as an opportunity to rewrite history, and thereby correct perceived wrongs or disaster. Yet if, for instance, it were possible to assassinate Hitler before his rise to power, the unintentional consequence would be to scrub Israel from the atlas, as only the global horror arising from the Holocaust led world powers to support the creation of the Jewish state (Balfour Declaration not withstanding). Similarly, preventing the assassination of Franz Ferdinand would have saved millions of lives through the prevention of World War One, yet without that conflict, Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia couldn't have attained independence. Political assassinations that did occur are perhaps disposable, yet we can never be sure if the Kennedys, for instance, would have altered the historical timeline noticeably had they lived, and indeed Johnson merely appears to have fulfilled the agenda that his predecessor couldn't complete in one abridged term. Perhaps we just have to trust that each historical generation will leave an improved planet to their successors.

[WOM]

Yup.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Perhaps we just have to trust that each historical generation will leave an improved planet to their successors.

That doesn't seem to be working too well at the moment.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

If future time travellers have come back and engineered it that Trump be President, Hillary Clinton must have been dropping nukes on Europe for some reason by now.

[G-Man]

Unless those future time travellers are utter assholes.

[Satchmo Distel]

If the human causes of global warming started 200 years ago, each generation has literally been leaving behind a worse planet.

You can also reverse the OP to find events that created long-term calamity. The creation of Israel arguably gave us a far worse situation than if the western powers had agreed to take millions of Jewish refugees in 1933-1941 to prevent their murder, and if they'd not allowed Hitler to re-militarize. And what might those six million dead Jews (and 80 million dead people globally from WW2) have contributed to history had they lived?

What might a more moderate revolution in Russia in 1917 have achieved.

Call these "historical opportunity costs"

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

The biggest cause of global warming, pollution and natural destruction has been the massive rise in global human population. Maybe if the Yanks and Soviets had started lobbing nukes at each other and Sheffield in the 1980s those of us who'd survived would all be better off.

[Nefertiti2]

The biggest cause of global warming, pollution and natural destruction has been the massive rise in global human population. Maybe if the Yanks and Soviets had started lobbing nukes at each other and Sheffield in the 1980s those of us who'd survived would all be better off.

That's not a very sensible thing to say.

[Flynnie]

The biggest cause of global warming, pollution and natural destruction has been the massive rise in global human population. Maybe if the Yanks and Soviets had started lobbing nukes at each other and Sheffield in the 1980s those of us who'd survived would all be better off.

Thanks, Malthus.

[Lang Spoon]

You really want to watch Threads again, Rogin. The quickly dead were the lucky ones.