this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey's Beads. It's an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn't be possible.
Too big. An alteration of the timeline where that's not the case would basically be one that didn't involve humanity at all. Not sure you fully understood the question, it's not asking what's great about living in this point in time, but rather, of the different paths humanity could have taken, what makes this one good.
Did you ever stop and consider things could be different in other time zone completely unrelated to humanity. Consider our non is smaller or farther and we never get solar eclipses. Small detail, humanity still here (with smaller waves).
Time LINE. You're talking about going so far back that humanity wouldn't exist. And if you go that far back and try to jumpstart evolution to have humans exist sooner; disregarding how that completely ignores how evolution works, any society that would arise would be indecipherable compared to our own. The resulting "humans" could be hairless and have purple skin. Think of the hot-dog fingers timeline from 'Everything, Everywhere, All At Once" except the world they live in wouldn't look anything close to ours. They would instead communicate entirely by slapping and live in long tunnels made of beeswax or some shit like that. There are too many branching paths and variables to get anything even close to recognizable.
For the purposes of the main question OP asked, it's pointless to go back that far. We're no longer talking about "how might modern society be different if we had made different choices, and what choices have we made that turned out to be good?" but instead saying "what if humanity never evolved and something else did instead?"
A better example, let's look at the Grand Canyon. Carved by the Colorado River over millions of years. But let's say you went back far enough to deviate the river's path so that it never ran through modern day Arizona. At that point, it's pointless to ask how the Grand Canyon might look different because there wouldn't BE a Grand Canyon!