Biff
Posted on 09/22/2010 8:32:49 PM PDT by Abin Sur
If you could eliminate one person from history, who would it be? One caveat: it can't be Muhammad, for one simple reason: almost everyone is going to pick him! This would get rather monotonous, so let's just assume that 90% (at least) of the responses would pick Muhammad first. If you still pick him...BZZT I'm sorry, you've lost, thank you for playing and here's a copy of our home game.
And let's not have anyone picking Muhammad's father or grandfather just to get at him, either. That's cheating.
Ok, now that that's out of the way, who do you pick? Here's the rules: You can go back in history and prevent any one person from being born. You don't have to kill anyone. For instance, if you want to stop Hitler from being born, you can go up to Klara Pölzl (Adolph's mother) in 1880 and give her 10,000 marks to emigrate to the USA. She never marries Alois, so presto...no Adolph. This will have the incidental effect of preventing his brothers from being born as well, of course.
After you prevent your target from being conceived, you snap back to 2010 and enjoy living in a world made better by your actions. Bear in mind, though, that removing someone from history may not have that great an effect. If you prevent Darwin from existing, someone is still going to come up with the theory of evolution. It may be called by another name, and it may be delayed by a decade or two, but things tend to get invented when it's time to invent them.
I would note that some individuals would be exceptions. If you took out Isaac Newton (heaven know why, but it's your choice), modern science as we know it would be delayed by half a century, at least.
Anyway, that's the setup. Who do you pick, and what do you think would be the result of this person not existing?
Shaykh Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab
Biff
Why don’t you make like a tree, and get out of here.
Definitely satan, if not him then Kari Longmier.
lawrence of arabia
Ha-clever.
He was an English guy
He came to fight the Turkish.
yep. get rid of him. then watch how that dominoes the rest of history.
LOL
Abraham’s Egyptian maid, Ishtar.
Er...who? And why?
I’m thinking no Ishtar no Ismael no Ismael no Arabs
no Arabs no Muhamed, no Muhamed no Islam and so forth.
Now how many toes have I stepped on?
That’s what I’m thinking. The reason people are outrageously successful, even the evil ones, is because they tap into a strain of popular thought.
Like the free market, often someone else will come up with the same idea.
James Cameron. Then we would have been spared BOTH Titanic AND the weird Blue movie.
Other than him, Nancy Pelosi. I know another would take her place, but I just find her really, really irritating.
Nick Saban.
The 72 virgins.
Myself.
As the solipsist, none of this happens :-)
(I have arranged for the Tea Party to win in 2010 and 2012 but the world still gets destroyed by Apophis in 2036 and I move on to another planet.)
Rachel Carson
Cannot go wrong with eliminating SATAN. There would be no unintended consequences just the removal of evil.
The original root of evil.
If there had been no protestant reformation, Europe would probably have remained a backwater, thanks to catholicism’s anti-usury stance, which hampered capitalism and the investment needed for more complex innovations and inventions to flourish...
Lincoln.
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