This is what I think of as the bridge odds argument.
13 cards are dealt to four of you. You say "Wow, look at this. That's a 1/52 probability that I have the first card, a 1/28 probability of the second card...and a 1/4 probability of getting the last card. My god! The probability of me being dealt this hand is billions to 1! It must have some real significance..."
The reason why it isn't remarkable is that you are evaluating the post hoc situation; for there to be significance you need to specify what is required beforehand - then the probability becomes noteworthy. So when you are sitting at your PC saying "Wow! Humanity made it this far! What is the probability of that?" the answer is 1. Otherwise you wouldn't be here to think about it. (VERY similar to the strong anthropic principle.)
Secondly, most of your examples might have had extremely unpleasant consequences but the thousand year reich couldn't have lasted that long even if Hitler had won war. By this time it would probably, like the Soviet Union, fractured into its component states. Not to say that it wouldn't have been dreadful in the meantime, but it wouldn't have been the end of homo sapiens.
I know vaguely the stories of the if-somebody-hadn't-done-their-job-properly-there-would-have-been-nuclear-armageddon, but although that would have been even worse than a Nazi victory, I'm not convinced even that would have destroyed us.
Finally, if somebody is nudging us, their doing a ****-poor job. It would have been easy to nudge Hitler out of the picture in the early 1930s avoiding WW2 altogether; likewise a couple of nudges in the right place would have prevented the development of the cold war. Nudging Stalin out of the way in the 1920s. Without a world war and the cold war we may have discovered and been using nuclear power long before its warfare capabilities were thought of.
Greedy and self-aggrandising heads of state could have been 'nudged' out of the way in South American and African states, Mao could have been nudged out of the way on the Long March...
Bookmarks