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Open Thread: January 2010 — LessWrong

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Open Thread: January 2010

1st Jan 2010

1 min read

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And happy new year to everyone.

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I'd really, really like to see what the world would be like today if a single butterfly's wings had flapped slightly faster back in 5000 B.C.

[anonymous]16y-10

Probably not badly enough to pony up for the computational power necessary to find the answer though, right?

ETA: Nevermind, didn't see the parent prompt. Still an important consideration though, so I'm leaving it in...

2anonym16y

Along the same idea, but much more likely to yield radical differences to the future of human society, I'd like to know what would have happened if some ancient bottleneck epidemic had not happened or had happened differently (killed more or fewer people, or just different individuals). Much or all of the human gene pool after that altered event would be different.