History is full of unimaginable "what if's" and great near-misses.
For example, the legendary conqueror Alexander the Great died suddenly at the age of 33. The son of the Greek ruler Philip II and student to Aristotle, Alexander succeeded his father at the age of 20. Within 10 years, he had built one of the most vast empires in the history of civilization. It ranged from Greece to Northern India out to Egypt. At the time of his death, Alexander was plotting an invasion of Italy where his forces of Persian and Greek soldiers outnumbered Rome's by an order of magnitude.