Around 13.8 billion years ago our universe came into being with a “Big Bang.” In the first second, gravity and all other laws of physics were fixed.[i] If any of these laws had been a tiny bit different, the universe as we know it would not have been possible. If, say, hydrogen had transformed into helium in a way that converted 0.006% of its mass to energy instead of 0.007%, no such transformation could have taken place and we would have a universe containing nothing but hydrogen. But if the rate of conversion had been 0.008%, we might have had a universe entirely without hydrogen.[ii] The odds of the laws of physics ending up exactly the way they did border on the impossible. Some physicists believe that there have been trillions upon trillions of universes, and this one just happened to be suitable for humans.[iii]

           Billions of years later, 66 million years ago, the earth was struck by an asteroid. It wasn’t very large – just 10 kilometers across. The earth is 12.800 kilometers across, so the asteroid was about the size of a BB pellet to a two-story house.[iv] But, unlike a BB pellet, the asteroid left a crater some 40 kilometers deep. That is four Mount Everests.

           Luckily, such impacts are rare. On average, they occur once in 500 million years. That is a long time, even in cosmic terms. Also, the asteroid hit one of the worst spots imaginable, with just the right (or wrong?) geology to cause a truly terrible disaster.[v] If the asteroid had arrived half an hour later, the spin of the earth would have caused it to hit a less sensitive spot. But it didn’t. Instead, the asteroid hit the reset button of life on earth. When the smoke cleared, mammals turned out to have done less badly than most life-forms, and their main competitors, the dinosaurs, were gone. We humans are the descendants of these mammals.

           Another big jump forward brings us to a mere 70,000 years ago. Humans had already been around for 130,000 years, but now we were an endangered species. Through genetic studies, we can see that all living humans are descended from just a few thousand individuals. Our numbers might have declined by nearly 99%.[vi] Why did this happen? Nobody knows for sure. Yet we pulled through.   

           The next jump brings us into living memory. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis risked turning the Cold War hot. A small flotilla of Soviet submarines was ordered to sneak past the American blockade. When one of the submarines was discovered, the American navy dropped practice-depth charges to force it to surface. Not knowing that the charges were of a practice variety, the submarine captain concluded that war had broken out and panicked. He decided to fire the submarine’s secret weapon – a nuclear torpedo.

Fortunately, one Vasily Arkhipov was also aboard. Though Arkhipov was only second in command of the submarine, he was curiously enough the commanding officer of the flotilla. That meant that his permission to use the nuke was needed. After a heated argument, he refused to give that permission.[vii] Nobody knows what would have happened if Arkhipov had chosen differently.

           Events like these rule world history. They are not even uncommon. It is wondrous that mankind ever came into being, and ever more so that we stayed that way. Over the billions of years since the Big Bang, the hundreds of millions of years of life on earth, the few hundred thousand years of our own species, and the thousand-year history of civilization, infinite things could have happened that would have ensured that no one would be around to either write or read this book; or do anything else, for that matter. That we are here is a great stroke of luck. Tragically, it required that an endless number of alternate universes never came into existence.   

           This book is an investigation of the randomness of history. As I hope to show, history is littered with examples of the smallest and strangest things having huge consequences. In 323 BC, Alexander the Great’s greatness was cut short when he became sick and died at age 32. In the 15oos, King Henry VIII’s wish to divorce his wife led to England’s divorce from Catholicism. In 1941, mold on a cantaloupe was discovered to create large amounts of penicillin and thus saved hundreds of millions of lives.[viii] In 2019, a typo in the genome of a Chinese bat virus started a pandemic. The history of the world could and would have been very different if not for these things and billions of others. Let us take a look at just a few of these. 

[i] Bill Bryson. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Black Swan. (2016)[2003]. Chapter 1, page 28.

[ii] Ibid., page 35.

[iii] Ibid., page 34.

[iv] Sean B. Carroll. A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You. Princeton University Press. (2020). Chapter 1, page 21.

[v] Ibid. Page 31.

[vi] David Lockwood. Fooled by the Winners: How Survivor Bias Deceives Us. Greenleaf Book Group Press. (2021). Chapter 7, page 115.

[vii] Priscilla Roberts. Cuban Missile Crisis: The Essential Reference Guide. ABC-CLIO. (2012). Entry: “Arkhipov, Vasili Alexandrovich (1926–1999).”

[viii] Bill Bryson. The Body. Doubleday. (2019). Chapter 3, section 3, page 43.