Pivotal events
History is filled with thousands of pivotal events that have shaped the world.
Take for example, the world wars. They showed humans what they are capable of and how they must be extremely careful before declaring all out war.
Before that, there were many kings, queens and advisors who, through their decisions, diverted the course of history.
Going back in history, a lone inventor here and there in this or that tribe discovered agriculture, the wheel, making stone tools and controlling fire. These sharp people have had as powerful of an impact on our current world as did Einstein. We will never know them. Maybe their own children never knew them.
But we enjoy the fruits of the trees that were sowed in the past.
Going further back, that asteroid that wiped off dinosaurs, created a vacuum where mammals could thrive. In the meantime, there have been thousands of individual animals and life-forms who were, in a sense, directly responsible for our current world, by going here rather than there, by luckily developing some mutation, by choosing this mate than that, by dodging the predator and so on.
This continues back to the first life more than 3.5 billion years ago and we get a massively zoomed out image of our journey till now.
We may decide that God or some entity chose all these events to happen for our benefit, or you can just see the evidence and wonder for yourself what is more elegant.
And the thing about pivotal events is that we seldom know that we are living through one. The current age of information is one such event, and so was the printing press. But most of the pivotal events have been simple ones which were perhaps just mildly exciting events when they happened.
