You are not born

[sunsurf]

Purely hypothetically, of course...

Birth
The doctor who would have delivered me, starts his vacation a bit earlier, and hence meets an old college chum who gets him involved in some business dealings which turn shady. A congressman is involved, and it spreads from there. The business dealings go sour, the scandal spreads, other Congressmen are implicated or make comments which the voters don't like. Different men become candidates for president, the election goes the other way...

Age 5
I was honored to be chosen to take some paperwork to the principal's office. On the way, some exuberant ten-year-olds yelled at me. I felt intimidated and stayed away from them.
Without me, another child would be chosen, he sticks around the ten-year-olds, makes friends with them, maybe gets in trouble for losing the papers, he gets involved in their political activities, he goes to work for a certain congressman...

Age 18
Without me, my older brother recruits somebody else to help him with his local political activism, that person gets interested in local and state politics, becomes an aide to a US Senator...

 

[Max Sinister]

Ask me in 50 years again.

 

[Mako-Chan]

SM-Less World:

1988: With no child of their own, my parents are in considerably better financial shape.

1990: Butterflies lead to my parents having two fraternal twins in this year, instead of identical twins in 1991 as in OTL.

1996: With no son of her own to dote on and more time, my mother adopts a more relaxed attitude towards her children. She ends up taking up part-time work as an artist (10 years earlier than OTL).

1999: More differences begin to pop up. My father moves to a different location than OTL, settling somewhere else. He never experiences the sudden revival of interest in Zen Buddhism and meditation that he showed after his disastrous stay in Connecticut.

2004: David Castro (aka Straha) produces very different creative work, without myself to interfere. He may not be banned either (butterflies)

2005: In Rhode Island, a high school psychologist never gets pulled over and accused of drug use. She never goes to trial, and thus continues to work in the same town. Elsewhere, a teenage girl kills herself. There is also one less blood donor.

2006: In Ohio, a gay teenage boy becomes severely depressed, and possibly kills himself.

2007-2010: Several creative works are not created/published.

 

[HelloLegend]

If I was not born, a certain officer in the Navy would not have been promoted due to the fact that the calculation of his flight hours would have been incorrect.

They say that baseball is a game of inches.

In this case, I spotted an error in his flight logbook (7 years in his past), which gave him about 29.7 "special" flight hours that was not previously credited in a for a particular category that is important in evaluating promotion.

He thanked me after he was promoted, saying that he would never have been "in the running" for promotion if I had not found that error since his service record would have been less competitive compared to the other candidates, which he knew from other squadrons.

This alone changes history due to the fact that I have potentially changed who becomes a Captain of Carrier Air Group or not.

While it is true that this individual might have merited promotion in the future, it is also true that the Navy is a shrinking entity in terms of promotion and maybe next time, they weren't looking for as many LCDRs as in this cycle. Plus, butterflies added to the seniority level at each position hence, meaning a delay in promotion for this individual might change who they select to promote at the next level. The butterflies might actually change who gets picked for Rear Admiral (lower) at some point in the future. Even smaller butterflies, would shake the world down the line...

For example, this LT who become LCDR now gets a different path in duty station assignment. Instead of going to one duty station, he goes to another. His teenage son might get a girl pregnant, and they have a baby, now the world has another person who would have never existed, or his son might marry someone else. etc.

HelloLegend was the greatest Flight Operations Yeoman ever! Unlike others who only assume the pilot of wso's logbook from the point of joining the squadron, HL went into the past to make sure all the past math was correct too!