问HN：世界上曾经躲过的危机时刻
有时我会感到沮丧，回顾历史中因为一次小小的不幸而发生的转折，导致从我的角度来看，事情变得比原本可能的情况要糟糕得多，仅仅是因为一点运气不佳。
我在想，考虑一些相反的案例可能会有所帮助，即我们幸运地避开了某些事情，甚至可能没有意识到，因为我们不一定会花很多时间去思考，或者甚至意识到那些几乎发生的不幸事件。（更不用说那些从未发生的好事了。）
最明显的例子是两次可能避免的核战争：瓦西里·阿尔基波夫在古巴导弹危机期间阻止了一艘苏联潜艇发起核打击，以及斯坦尼斯拉夫·彼得罗夫选择不报告美国的导弹发射，因为他（正确地）认为这是一次误报。
还有其他类似的例子吗？我想，持有与我截然不同信念体系的人可能会把我一些不幸的经历视为幸运，但是否还有其他相对客观的例子？比如偶然发现的重大发现，如果没有这些偶然，可能还需要很长时间才能被发现？险些避免的战争？还有其他我甚至没有考虑到的积极事件？
最后补充一句，这并不是我开始写作时想到的，但我现在想起了苹果电视系列剧《为了人类的未来》。虽然这显然是虚构的，并且进行了很多艺术加工，但我认为它很好地展示了个别事件如何显著改变历史。
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I sometimes find myself frustrated, looking at ways history turned on a tiny unlucky break, resulting in things being, from my perspective, significantly worse than they otherwise might have been but for a bit of bad luck.<p>I was thinking it might be helpful to consider cases of the opposite, when we got lucky and maybe I don't even realize it, since we wouldn't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about, or even necessarily be aware of, a bad thing that merely <i>almost</i> happened. (Or even more so, a good thing that never did.)<p>The most obvious examples are the two instances of possibly averted nuclear war: Vasily Arkhipov blocking the launch of a nuclear strike from a Soviet sub during the Cuban missile crisis, and Stanislav Petrov choosing not to report an apparent missile launch from the US in the (correct) belief that it was a false alarm.<p>Are there any others that come to mind? I suppose someone with a very different belief system than mine might count some of my unlucky happenings instead as lucky ones, but are there any other reasonably objective ones? Discoveries made by chance that likely would not have been made for a long time otherwise? Wars narrowly averted? Other sorts of positive events I'm not even considering?<p>As a final aside, this wasn't in my mind when I started writing, but I'm now reminded of the Apple TV series For All Mankind. While it's obviously fiction and takes a lot of liberties, I think it does pretty well at showing how significantly history might be altered by individual events.