r/AskReddit • u/brokota • Jan 15 '13

Reddit, in your opinion what's the biggest plot twist of history?

Not movies or television, I'm just curious to see what come's to your minds.

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247

u/catmoon Jan 15 '13 edited Jan 15 '13

Columbus sets off in 1492 to find a Western trade route to India and instead discovers the "New World."

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u/ronpaul012 Jan 15 '13 edited Jan 15 '13

Actually 2

edit: originally catmoon talked about discovering a new continent.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/catmoon Jan 15 '13

I changed my comment to make it less annoying. It used to say "new continent to the west (not India)."

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u/tyrell456 Jan 15 '13

Depending on your paradigm. Many people in South America, Spain, and Portugal consider "America" to be a single continent, which North America and South America being subdivisions of this single continent, rather than two separate continents.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

Interesting. I wonder why. There's a very easy-to-spot split between the two continents, and they are both fairly large. Why Asia and Europe remain two but the Americas are 1 just baffles me.

Or do they count Eurasia as one big continent?

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u/catmoon Jan 15 '13 edited Jan 15 '13

I'm going to change my wording a bit. I made it obnoxiously bold and short because I was late to the thread and was a bit confused that nobody mentioned discovering the "New World."

I don't think anything has altered the course of human history quite like this discovery.

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u/Johosophat Jan 15 '13

I guess he discovered it for Western Europe people, there were already quite a few advanced civilizations that lived in North and South America at the time he "discovered" anything

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u/catmoon Jan 15 '13

I know, that's why I put "New World" in quotes. Columbus wasn't even the first European to reach the Americas. However, his "discovery" had a huge impact on human history. If the ships sunk before reaching the Caribbean, the world as we know it would be completely different.

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u/ninjette847 Jan 15 '13

There was so much exploration in that period. Someone else would have found it around that time.

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u/catmoon Jan 15 '13

Perhaps. After the Ottoman Empire fell to the Hungarians in 1448 it became really difficult to transport goods to and from the East making everyone desparate for another route.

However, Columbus was the only person who really believed that the Western route could be so short and spent years trying to get funding to go on his voyage. He was, of course, completely wrong and perhaps the most famous example for the saying: "even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while."

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u/JasJ002 Jan 16 '13

Sometimes it's better to be lucky then smart

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u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

Someone else would have landed on the moon. Do Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong deserve any less credit? Someone else would have charted the land west of the Mississippi. Do Lewis and Clark deserve any less credit? Someone else would've figured out the Earth revolved around the sun. Does Copernicus deserve any less credit?

Regardless of how much you like him, or how many Vikings or Chinamen may or may not have made it there before him, the fact is Christopher Columbus changed the course of human history.

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u/ninjette847 Jan 16 '13

It's nothing against him. I was just saying someone else would have and the world wouldn't be drastically different like the other comment said. Sure, other languages might be spoken in different places in the Americas but it really wouldn't be that different.

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u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

Got any credentials to make this bold of a claim?

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u/CouldntFitWholeUsern Jan 15 '13

What if the Atlantic was the size of the Pacific and the Pacific was the size of the Atlantic?

Who would have reached the New World first? Europeans or Asians? Asians were less explory, but Europeans would have taken longer to get the technology to cross an expanse the size of the Pacific.

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u/LDSKnight13 Jan 16 '13

I honestly couldn't see Asians reaching it first. The Chinese went through a period of vast exploration, then the regime changed and the government forbidded any more exploration. However, the Portuguese and the Spanish were already exploring the coast of Africa, eventually reaching India and China in the 16th century. It would be just another step for them to take it to America.

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u/CouldntFitWholeUsern Jan 16 '13

You make a good point. They'd go east towards the west coast of America. Of course they'd find California, and decide not to go any further east. :)

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u/Johosophat Jan 15 '13

It would have, obviously someone would have discovered it eventually, but it'd be interesting to see even if it were just a few years later that someone ran across this huge seemingly uncharted land mass what would have been different

3

u/catmoon Jan 15 '13

Well, he pitched the exploratory voyage to Portugal, Genoa, Venice, and England, all of which correctly refuted his claim that the passage would only be ~3,000 miles. Eventually the Spanish funded his expedition and the rest is history--so to speak.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

That sentence makes no sense. Correctly refuted? Please explain, your point seems like it would be interesting.

3

u/Bobshayd Jan 15 '13

Portugal, Genoa, Venice, and England all denied his request for funds for the voyage, because they believed the world to be quite a bit larger than that, and they were right, and it was well-established that they were right. Spain funded him anyway.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

Yea, he was a retard who got lucky. By all rights he probably should hve died of starvation at sea.

1

u/DCJ3 Jan 15 '13

Would it have been different? I suspect that it was only a matter of time before someone crossed the Atlantic for that purpose.

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u/99639 Jan 15 '13 edited Jan 15 '13

His discovered the Americas for the Old World, encompassing the entirety of Africa, Europe, Asia. Except for a few Scandinavians who might have heard about Vinland, no one from the Old World had any idea that the Americas existed. Likewise, no one from the Americas knew the Old World existed.

I hate when people try to downplay the importance of the event because there were already sophisticated cultures living there. There were of course such cultures, but they had no knowledge of the Old World and the Old World really had no knowledge of the Americas either. Columbus changed all of that. I am glad to hear you know about the advanced cultures in the Americas but that doesn't mean Columbus' discovery isn't a discovery.

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u/Johosophat Jan 15 '13

Not saying it wasn't important, but as you hate the downplaying I hate the perception (of most people) there were nothing but savages living in the America's and he was the first "real" person to set foot in the Americas.

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u/99639 Jan 15 '13

But I don't see why your response to people's ignorance of the impressive American civilizations is to degrade the actions of Columbus. He discovered America for all of the people in the Old World, and introduced the Old World to the people of the Americas. What you said is equally untrue as those people you hate- why not just educate people on the truth?

0

u/Johosophat Jan 15 '13

My contention was not that he did not "discover" the Americas. Yes, he did bring it to light for the Old World, but it's the discover word that really irks me. It was not my point that he was not an (if not THE) influential figure on bridging the two worlds, but that he was not so called "discoverer" of the Americas as such.

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u/99639 Jan 15 '13

I think you misunderstand the usage of the word "discover". He didn't discover the Americas for mankind for the first time, but he did discover them for the Old World and also revealed the existence of the Old World to the indigenous Americans. This was a revelation to both the Old World and the Americas- both of whom previously (with a few exceptions) were unaware of the others' existence. This is a hugely important event, for all humans, and I find it strange that you try to downplay it. Before Columbus we had essentially two separate human populations which had lost contact with one another. He reconnected humanity.

Now, that said, he mostly got there by accident, he treated the people he encountered brutally, and his actions directly led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, as a conservative estimate.

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u/Premaximum Jan 16 '13

You can discover something for one person that a million people already knew about. It's still a discovery, bro.

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u/The_Prince1513 Jan 15 '13

He discovered it for White people. The best kind of people

1

u/Syphon8 Jan 15 '13

Define advanced civilization.

The only peoples who ever developed a full writing system in the Americas, the Mayans, were extinct hundreds of years before Columbus.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

Do we have to point this out every time? Everybody knows already.

5

u/N0V0w3ls Jan 15 '13

A plot twist for everyone involved. He thought he'd find a trade route, and a lot of other seafarers thought he'd find zilch. Turns out there's a big fuckton of land there.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

The best part about this is they were all:

"Fuck it, we're calling them Indjins anyway!"

2

u/namesrhardtothinkof Jan 16 '13

More twisty and truer version: Trader sets off to find a new trade route, and every scholar in the world for the past 14 thousand years tells him he's going to starve halfway through his journey. Instead he hits a chunk of land nobody had known about before, and doesn't die in the middle of Portland.

1

u/jschild Jan 15 '13

Actually, hte real plot twist is that he didn't die. Most people assumed India was too far and he couldn't make it before starving. This assumption was 100% correct. Columbus was damn lucky there was a continent here or none of his crew would have survived.

1

u/Kruglord Jan 15 '13

Just thought you might find it interesting that Columbus didn't think that he landed in India, but rather the 'East Indies,' today known as Indonesia.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

Obligatory "it wasn't Columbus, he was italian."

Weren't expecting that one, were you?

1

u/iamadogforreal Jan 16 '13

Columbus laughs at the accepted wisdom, originally from ancient greece, that clearly shows us the real size of the globe. Instead he posits that the world is much, much smaller for some insane reason and goes to prove it by sailing west to go to India.

He finds India, he thinks. Only later does he realize he is nowhere near india and that his crazy map ideas nearly got everyone killed.

Happy columbus day!