What is one thing you would change about history?

Change history is the assignment here the army would have been mobilised instead of fighting each other in the civil war.

Swap the Vikings for Rastafarians.

What a nonsensically arrogant and ridiculous post.

Eastern Europe communist regimes tried to suppress religion, and it didn't work. If anything, it resurfaced even stronger when those regimes felled. So if you were to try to really ban all religions some of them will go underground and become even stronger, and at least one of them will call for violence from its followers.

Not taking a precautionary principle approach to social media, the internet as a whole, and smartphones from day one was a mistake. We should have introduced them with meaningful restrictions early on and then gradually relaxed those limits as we better understood the risks and impacts. Instead, we allowed widespread, largely unregulated adoption, and now we are trying, likely unsuccessfully, to impose controls in reverse.

People could have said the very same about the printing press, or the radio or the TV when they arrived.

True, every major communication technology has had widespread adoption before society fully understood the consequences. But unlike the printing press, radio, or TV, social media and smartphones are interactive, data driven, and scale globally in real time, a feature known from the very start and built into their design. That level of systemic impact is unprecedented, which is why a precautionary approach would have mattered more, in my mind.

I would change nothing before 2015 as to do so would likely set off a chian of events that could have resulted in none of my children ever having been born.

Post 2015 - orchastrated the release of the Epstein files in early 2016 which would have torpedoed both Trumps and Clintons candidacy preventing the rise of MAGA and the de-stabilising effect that vile ideology is having on the entire globe.

…or again, maybe its not actually arrogance, but more so, we dont like to not know, and like to nicely tie things up in stories, largely to reduce our anxieties in the unknown

I think I read this before. What if you went back so stop a tragedy say 9/11 so you save 3000+lives. It turns out one of them is a madman who invents say Covid which kills 10s of thousands. Do you go back again to make sure 9/11 happens killing thousands of innocent people to make sure he dies.

I would have retained the more liberal Church Ireland had before the Normans introduced the mainstream Catholic rules. We were sort of Catholic but did things our own way. Clergy married and had children, hence surnames like McAnespie (son of the bishop) and MacTaggart (son of the priest). The monks were more powerful in our system than the bishops. I think our later negative experience after independence with Church domination reflected the kind of Church introduced in 1169. I think the churches of the Reformation also inherited this intolerance.