What happens if?

There is one phrase which I believe to be the ugliest and most evil in the human race. That phrase is: what happens if? It is only ever used to kill good ideas and is the enemy of the creative mind. Let me give you an example of something that could have been ruined, if ‘what happens if?’ had been deployed by a mealy mouthed idiot.  

Mr Newcomen is tinkering in his workshop. He is standing near a kettle attached to a stick which he believes can make water be out of the ground. He has been working on this machine for over a day and the time has arrived to test it. He takes his Zippo lighter from his pantaloons; he is going to light a fire underneath his kettle and thus symbolically light the blue touch paper on the age of steam.  But who is this tiptoeing into the room like a tosser? It’s his partner Mr Oldspunk; he looks serious and says “What if the kettle explodes? You’ll be killed.”  

Mr Newcomen looks at Mr Oldspunk then at the kettle and once again at Mr Oldspunk, and says “Yes you’re probably right.”  

At that moment we are plunged into a world without steam engines. Which means that the car isn’t invented and we remain reliant on horses to take us everywhere for the next two hundred years. However somebody has made everything else so we have a modern world with the internet and everything but nobody will have worked out how to make a car. But everything else would be the same, everything. Let me be entirely clear on that point – it wouldn’t be affected in the least.

QED? I don’t think so! 

There we have it.  Just one instance in which the world could have been irreparably damaged by caution. Luckily for us, Mr Oldspunk was killed by a rat stampede in 1698 so never met Mr Newcomen and the world was saved from a horrible fate. Hurray! I’m glad he died, Mr Oldspunk was a cunt. 

Steak and chunky chips again for tea.