You can go back in time and prevent a great catastrophe. Which one would you prevent?

not to be a party pooper, but why go back in time.
there are plenty of great catastrophes happening or waiting to happen right now.
difference is that those we actually CAN help prevent or contribute to it in our small ways.

Merry Andrew wrote:

Glad you made that point, Foxy. Whenever we think of preventing some great historical calamity, we never consider the collateral results of such intervention. Others have already mentoned, for example, that preventing the great evil of slavery in this country could have adversely affected the economic situation today. Would preventing the U.S. takeover of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898 have prevented any attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941? Maybe. Then what? What would preventing the birth of Hitler have accomplished? We don't know who would have come to power instead. It could have been someone equally depraved , but one so skilled the Allies couldn't defeat him. It's a very slippery slope, indeed.

Exactly. One of my favorite economists, a black man, of course recognizes the injustice, savagery, and inhumanity of slavery in all its forms and is adament that there is nothing to commend it. At the same time he recognizes that if somebody hadn't dragged his ancesters to this country as slaves, he would almost certainly not have acquired a PhD in economics, achieved an influential professorship in an excellent university, and would not be writing a syndicated column read by millions. Instead the odds were great that he would have been born into abject poverty in some poor African nation and would have few prospects to escape from that.

And, as you stated, how many times have we seen the world take down a corrupt dictator only to have that man replaced by a worse one?

And those people trying to make a case for a better world without Jesus of Nazareth, would the world have progressed as far as it has since it seems to be mostly predominently Christian nations that have achieved first world status? Whether or not one professes the Christian faith himself/herself, who among us can know what the world would be like today without all that Christian influence? Japan is the only non-Christian nation I can think of in which all the citizens enjoy first world status, but even Japan was dragged into the first world by the efforts of people of mostly European and American Christian faith.

I think it would be a really scary responsibility to be handed the ability to play God with the world or even a part of it.

This type of extinction is what we are most currently vunerable to with the potential of a shift in ocean circulation driven by climate change.

Re my post above... Isn't it also a statement of how self-centered the US is to think our nation / economy wouldn't be what it is today had we not had slavery? What if Eli had been born in Africa and we had to (OMG!) import the cotton gin? What if all of the slave labor had been allowed to stay in their own country and make their nation a super power? There may have been other things invented based on their natural resources (I don't think they grow cotton in Africa, do they?) that could have contributed just as much if not more to the world. Other things may have happened that would have led to Obama being the leader of Kenya rather than the United States.

I think that is where some in the U.S. forget that we are one people, one world. But for damn fine luck, any one of us could have been born elsewhere.