>>Here's a great what if question--what if the Titanic had missed the iceberg???? <<
Quite an interesting question there, Sharon. As David Brown has been quick to point out on several occassions, history does not reveal it's alternatives. Unless somebody can find a way to peek into one of the hypothetical "Alternative Universes" that some quantum physicists specualate on...assuming they do in fact exist...I don't think we'll ever know.
With the above caveat thrown in my own opinion is that overall, I'n not sure the world would have been *that* radically different in the grand scheme of things. For all that I have the same overwhelming interest as anyone else here, I'm well aware that Titanic was of little real historical importance.
Yes, there were changes made in shipping practices such as a change in shipping lanes, and an overhaul of regulations regarding lifesaving appliances such as lifeboats, but absent that, this would have happened anyway. It just would have taken longer. I think it's worth noting that the regulations being outdated was not a great unknown and that some shipbuilders were already planning for them. Alexander Carlisle, the guy who designed the Olympic class, had space and weight set aside for additional lifeboats from the start in anticipation of this, and this was something he had figured out back in 1909.
Absent Titanic, my own feeling is that eventually, another ship would have come to grief the same way. The dangerous navigation practices which led to the accident were so all pervasive that it was less a question of if such an accident would happen, but when it would happen. The usual round of reforms and kneejerk reactions would have quickly followed.
Even accounting for the fact that Titanic was not in and of her own right of the greatest historical importance, there's one fly in the ointment here that I don't think is ever considered and that's the people who were aboard the ship who never made it to the other side of the Atlantic.
This is where the wonderful world of chaos theory comes into play because we have no way of knowing what sort of influance each of these people would have had in the course of historical events. What if the guy or gal who would have found the cure for cancer...all forms of it...went down with the ship, unnoticed and trapped in steerage?
What if the person who would have had the smarts to stop the Great Depression or the Wheelbarrow Inflation of Germany's Weimar Republic befor it ever had a chance to get started actually froze to death in the water that night? What if one of the chaps in second class would have been the soldier who would have put a bullet into Corperal Hitler's brain in the trenches of World War One had lived instead of died?
Of the people who survived, how would their lives have differed and what course would they have taken had that maiden voyage ended uneventfully in New York with their loved ones at their side?
1497 people died that night and every one of them has a story that never had a chance to be told, and would have been part of an intricate chain of cause and effect we can only guess at. In this sense, I would argue that Titanic was a lot more important then we may realize but for very different reasons.
But that's just my opinion.