Five Most Important Events/Occurrences in History...

[Coito ergo sum]

The destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria. Fuckers retarded our civilisation 1000 years (possibly).

Didn't think of that one right off - good one.

[Coito ergo sum]

From my point of view - any 5 of my ancestors successfully reproducing is equally important to any other event in history.

Very true...

And, we can certainly say that the entirety of human history may hinge upon "Thag" defeating "Gog" in hand to hand combat 30,000 years ago over a woman....

[Clinton Huxley]

330 AD - Dedication of Constantinople. Forced the Dervishes to go the long way round to get to Europe.

[FedUpWithFaith]

By far the most important event in world history was when the Gorabs, visiting from a planet near the Crab Nebula, replaced almost all humans with Gorab replicants in 1368. Only a handful of real humans, like me, remain to tell the story.

[Bella Fortuna]

By far the most important event in world history was when the Gorabs, visiting from a planet near the Crab Nebula, replaced almost all humans with Gorab replicants in 1368. Only a handful of real humans, like me, remain to tell the story.

[FedUpWithFaith]

By far the most important event in world history was when the Gorabs, visiting from a planet near the Crab Nebula, replaced almost all humans with Gorab replicants in 1368. Only a handful of real humans, like me, remain to tell the story.

Not funny! Nobody ever believes the RealHumans(TM) like me. Know wonder you brainwashed Gorab fuckers won.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

From my point of view - any 5 of my ancestors successfully reproducing is equally important to any other event in history.

Very true...

And, we can certainly say that the entirety of human history may hinge upon "Thag" defeating "Gog" in hand to hand combat 30,000 years ago over a woman....

More likely a battle between a couple of unnamed multicellular blobs just before the start of the paleozoic.

[orpheus]

From my point of view - any 5 of my ancestors successfully reproducing is equally important to any other event in history.

Very true...

And, we can certainly say that the entirety of human history may hinge upon "Thag" defeating "Gog" in hand to hand combat 30,000 years ago over a woman....

More likely a battle between a couple of unnamed multicellular blobs just before the start of the paleozoic.

I like the way Neal Stephenson puts it when introducing a character in Cryptonomicon:

Let's set the existence-of-god issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo--which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

[macdoc]

We were restricting to historical

Death of Ghenghis Khan big ....the outriders were at the walls of Vienna? Venice ? anyway - all of Europe was there for the taking....

•••
Washington...I think no question the war was lost without that action by Washington and then things would have been very very different...

[owtth]

I'll go with the Black Death.

[Coito ergo sum]

I'll go with the Black Death.

Heck yeah - that's a doozy right there.

[Bruce Burleson]

1) Battle of San Jacinto -April 21, 1836 - Texas defeated Mexico, became a Republic and was later annexed to USA. Mexico continued to contest the border with Texas, leading to the Mexican-American War, in which Mexico lost 1/3 of its territory and the US doubled its size, gaining most of the territory of the western states and pushing its limits to the Pacific Ocean, thus creating the basis for its superpower status today. (OK, maybe my Texas bias influenced this decision just a little);

2) The establishment of Christianity;

3) The establishment of Islam;

4) The invention of nuclear weapons;

5) The invention of the personal computer and the internet.

Together, these five events basically shape the modern world - the religious conflict between Christianity and Islam, with the superpower USA engaged in this conflict, and the exchange of information over the internet allowing non-state organizations like Islamic terrorist groups to stay in the game, possibly eventually obtaining nuclear weapons, and leading the world to the brink of a destructive religious war.

[Ian]

[FedUpWithFaith]

1) Battle of San Jacinto -April 21, 1836 - Texas defeated Mexico, became a Republic and was later annexed to USA. Mexico continued to contest the border with Texas, leading to the Mexican-American War, in which Mexico lost 1/3 of its territory and the US doubled its size, gaining most of the territory of the western states and pushing its limits to the Pacific Ocean, thus creating the basis for its superpower status today. (OK, maybe my Texas bias influenced this decision just a little);

2) The establishment of Christianity;

3) The establishment of Islam;

4) The invention of nuclear weapons;

5) The invention of the personal computer and the internet.

Together, these five events basically shape the modern world - the religious conflict between Christianity and Islam, with the superpower USA engaged in this conflict, and the exchange of information over the internet allowing a non-state organizations like Islamic terrorist groups to stay in the game, possibly eventually obtaining nuclear weapons, and leading the world to the brink of a destructive religious war.

#1 has to be a joke, just like the "Great" State of Texas, home of the two fattest cities in the US!

[owtth]

I've been trying to remember a programme I heard a while back about the Black Death and I finally managed to remember, It was an In Our Times episode, and it painted the consequences in a fairly good light considering the death toll.

When it stopped in 1351 it left a continent ravaged but transformed – the poor found their labour to be valuable, religion was both reinforced and undercut, medicine progressed, art changed and the continent awash with guilt and memorialisation.

The show can be listened to here.