I travel back in time to the 1170s and shoot Temüjin, aka Genghis Khan, before he could establish his empire.
Although there had been good policies he promoted (e.g., religious tolerance, trade), the probable upsides vastly outweigh this.
Just to name a few that I consider to be most important:
1. During the Mongol conquest tens of millions perished. This had been the approximately third bloodiest “conflict” in all human history. However, unlike e.g. the World Wars, where several large belligerents existed without a single pivotal person (e.g., even without a Hitler, a bloody Second World War could have happened, just as a first one did in the same region between the same states) and almost all of it could have been avoided if the Mongol Empire is not formed at all.
2. As part of these conquests Baghdad and it’s Grand Library was destroyed, which were the center of Islamic scholarship of that time. Most likely this had been a huge factor in the decline of secularism and scientific inquiry in the Middle East.
3. The mainstream theory regarding the spread of Black Death in Europe says it arrived via Genoese traders who fled from the Mongol siege of Kaffa, Crimea, where mongols catapulted infected corpses over the city walls. If really that was the source, avoiding this could have changed the prevented/delayed the spread of the disease and deathtoll might have been much lower.
As these all would have happened about 8 centuries ago, the long term effects would be even greater.
I travel back in time to the 1170s and shoot Temüjin, aka Genghis Khan, before he could establish his empire.
Although there had been good policies he promoted (e.g., religious tolerance, trade), the probable upsides vastly outweigh this.
Just to name a few that I consider to be most important:
1. During the Mongol conquest tens of millions perished. This had been the approximately third bloodiest “conflict” in all human history. However, unlike e.g. the World Wars, where several large belligerents existed without a single pivotal person (e.g., even without a Hitler, a bloody Second World War could have happened, just as a first one did in the same region between the same states) and almost all of it could have been avoided if the Mongol Empire is not formed at all.
2. As part of these conquests Baghdad and it’s Grand Library was destroyed, which were the center of Islamic scholarship of that time. Most likely this had been a huge factor in the decline of secularism and scientific inquiry in the Middle East.
3. The mainstream theory regarding the spread of Black Death in Europe says it arrived via Genoese traders who fled from the Mongol siege of Kaffa, Crimea, where mongols catapulted infected corpses over the city walls. If really that was the source, avoiding this could have changed the prevented/delayed the spread of the disease and deathtoll might have been much lower.
As these all would have happened about 8 centuries ago, the long term effects would be even greater.