What if?

When humanity almost went extinct and 9 more shocking true stories

Image: The New York Public Library

History is full of near misses—moments where a single decision, accident, or twist of fate could have completely changed the world. From avoided wars to scientific breakthroughs nearly lost, these events remind us how fragile the course of history can be. Here are 10 times history almost took a dramatically different path.

Image: Toby Elliott

Around 70,000 years ago, a supervolcanic eruption in Indonesia nearly wiped out humanity. Genetic evidence suggests that the human population dropped to just a few thousand!

Had the decline been any worse, human civilization might never have recovered or developed as we know it today.

Image: K. Mitch Hodge

The Titanic’s distress flares were seen by the SS Californian, a ship just 10 miles away. However, the captain misinterpreted the signals and failed to respond.

Had the Californian arrived in time, hundreds of lives could have been saved. Instead, the tragedy cemented its place as one of history’s deadliest maritime disasters.

Image: Elimende Inagella

In 1812, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia seemed unstoppable—until an unexpectedly harsh winter decimated his army.

The Russian cold, coupled with severe supply shortages, forced Napoleon’s retreat. Only 10% of his troops survived, marking a turning point in European history.

Image: NASA

During the moon landing, Buzz Aldrin noticed a broken circuit breaker that could have stranded them on the lunar surface. Fortunately, he used a felt-tip pen to fix it.

If the makeshift repair had failed, Neil Armstrong and Aldrin might have been the first men to die on the moon.

Image: Peter Kvetny

In the 14th century, the bubonic plague killed millions. It nearly wiped out entire regions, transforming Europe’s social and economic structure.

If the disease had been slightly more virulent, the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution might never have happened.

Image: Tim Marshall

The Allies originally planned to invade Normandy on June 5, 1944, but a last-minute weather forecast prompted a 24-hour delay.

Had they gone ahead, bad weather could have doomed the invasion. The successful landing on June 6 helped turn the tide of World War II. Fortunately, we learned the lesson from Napoleon!

Image: Mark Stuckey

In 1605, Guy Fawkes’ plot to blow up the English Parliament was foiled at the last minute.

Had it succeeded, much of England’s leadership—including King James I—would have been killed, likely causing a massive power shift.

Image: Dan Meyers

In 1979, a training tape mistakenly showed a full-scale Soviet attack simulation on U.S. computers. Military leaders prepared to launch a counterattack.

The mistake was caught just in time. A nuclear war was narrowly avoided due to human intervention.

Image: Su San Lee

In 1281, a massive Mongol fleet attempted to invade Japan but was wiped out by a typhoon.

The storm, later called the "Divine Wind" (Kamikaze), saved Japan from conquest and altered the course of Asian history.

Image: Oo Jiflip

In 1961, a U.S. B-52 bomber broke apart over North Carolina, dropping two nuclear bombs. One nearly detonated—five of six safety switches had failed.

Had it exploded, the blast would have been 250 times more powerful than Hiroshima, devastating the Eastern Seaboard. The incident remains one of the closest calls in nuclear history.

Beloved lyrics

"For what is a man?": Some of the wisest lyric lines ever written

Paul Anka was terrified when he sat down to write the lyrics for a song that Frank Sinatra would be singing. Jokingly, he started with a dramatic, "And now, the end is near…" The rest is history. Who are the people who pen the words that others will spend decades repeating? How did they come up with words so precise and true that listeners would compare them with those of great philosophers? Here are 10 of people’s favorite lyrics of all time, decoded.

"For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught." The melody of "My Way" wasn't originally American. It began as a French song called Comme d'habitude, a number about a couple stuck in a stale marriage. Paul Anka heard it on the radio while in France and bought the rights on the spot, before he had any use for it.

That use arrived at a dinner in Miami, when Sinatra told him, almost in passing, that he was quitting the business. Anka flew home, sat down at a typewriter, and spent one night writing lyrics as if Sinatra himself were speaking them. Sinatra recorded it in two takes and later called it his "national anthem," and many agreed; Anka had written the exact words one wants to belt while closing an episode of their life.

In "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)," John Lennon wrote: "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." But the phrase originated with American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders, who published it in a 1957 issue of Reader's Digest ("Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans").

The line outlived everything else about the song, repeated at graduations and eulogies for decades since. Lennon was murdered shortly after the album's release, which means the song now carries a weight of hindsight neither he nor his listeners could have intended at the time.

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" A young Bob Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. He later claimed he wrote the entire song in about ten minutes at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, borrowing its melody from the old spiritual "No More Auction Block." He was twenty-one, barely a year into his New York career, and insisted at the time it wasn't a protest song at all.

The song never answers its questions, but keeps asking them. First published in the folk magazine Broadside in May 1962, it became the unofficial anthem of the civil rights and antiwar movements once Peter, Paul and Mary's cover shot to number two on the charts in 1963.

"... is equal to the love you make." This is the last song the four Beatles ever recorded together, and Paul McCartney built it deliberately as a farewell. He gave Ringo Starr his only drum solo in the band's history, a fight McCartney had to win through what he called "gentle persuasion," since Starr detested solos on principle.

For the closing line, McCartney said he'd been thinking about Shakespeare, who often ended a scene with a rhyming couplet so the audience would know it was truly over. Even John Lennon, who generally disliked the Abbey Road medley and rarely praised his old partner's work by 1980, admitted the closing thought was "a very cosmic, philosophical line."

"... but it’s better than drinking alone." "Piano Man", by Billy Joel, narrates a song in which the character is real. Joel wrote it about the six months he spent playing piano under the fake name "Bill Martin" at a Los Angeles lounge called The Executive Room. Even the waitress "practicing politics" was Elizabeth Weber, the woman who'd soon become his wife.

Joel wrote it while hiding out from a record label he was desperate to escape after his debut album flopped. It became a bittersweet anthem that many people love singing with others; it seems like, as the song suggests, singing sorrows together at the bar is better than feeling them at home.

The whole song "Both Sides Now," by Joni Mitchell, is often quoted as a deeply philosophical observation of life. It concludes that some mysteries of life are as unknowable as the clouds, or love, despite accumulating experience.

When she wrote it, Mitchell had recently given up a daughter for adoption after being left by the child's father. She was twenty-three, mid-flight, after a passage in Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King described its narrator looking down at clouds from an airplane, something human eyes had only been able to do for a few decades. Judy Collins released it first in 1967 and won a Grammy for it; Mitchell's own version didn't appear until her 1969 album Clouds.

Kris Kristofferson’s song, "Me and Bobby McGee", contains one of people’s favorite quotes from song lyrics. Its title came from producer Fred Foster, who suggested Kristofferson write a song about his colleague's secretary, Barbara "Bobbie" McKee.

Its most quoted idea about freedom and loss was inspired, Kristofferson later said, by the final scene of Fellini's La Strada, in which a man realizes too late what he threw away. Roger Miller released it first, but it was Janis Joplin's posthumous 1971 recording, finished mere days before her death, that turned it into a number one hit and an accidental epitaph.

"... and I'm getting older too." Nicks says she wrote "Landslide" in about five minutes, sitting in a rented house in Aspen while her partner and musical collaborator, Lindsey Buckingham, was on tour rehearsing with the Everly Brothers. The song's real subject isn't romance, but the vertigo of watching time pass. She was twenty-seven, broke, working as a waitress and a cleaner, and their duo album had just been dropped by its label.

Looking at the snow on the Rockies, she found herself deciding whether to keep chasing music at all. Three months later, Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham's guitar work on a demo and invited the pair into Fleetwood Mac, which changed their lives. The song has now aged into an anthem for anyone facing a hinge point in their own life.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you'll find you get what you need." Mick Jagger sketched this one alone on an acoustic guitar, calling it "one of those bedroom songs." It closed 1969's Let It Bleed just as the decade's peace-and-love optimism was cracking.

The song is upbeat and simple, and unexpectedly insists on an idea of acceptance or surrender that has more to do with Stoic philosophy than with pop rock optimism. But the listeners liked it, and many quote it often.

"...that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen worked on "Anthem" for roughly a decade, discarding draft after draft, before it finally appeared on his 1992 album The Future. He wasn't a man given to explaining his own lyrics, having spent years training as an ordained Zen Buddhist monk and generally preferring silence to self-analysis.

But "Anthem" has the clearest statement of a philosophy he'd circled his entire career: that brokenness can give way to grace. It has since been invoked by human rights activists, quoted at protests, and performed at civic ceremonies.