Sneeze Domination

Military power and advanced weaponry are the most effective ways of showing the power and the
might of a state to potentially invade another state. However what people fail to consider is that there is
another more common but almost equally powerful arsenal that every country has that can do the job just
as well as advanced weaponry and tactics. A sneeze can conquer the world.
At the height of the European expansion around the 1500s, the countries that remained ahead of
the colonial expansion era were among those that had the most advanced technology of their time.
Countries that had the technology to build bigger ships that allowed for longer voyages, paired with new
and more effective navigation systems, travelled to lands farther than what any other countries have been
to.
The Spanish voyages to the new world after Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas
was the epitome of conquest and navigation that impressed the world, which, at that time, included the
areas of the earth that Europe has been in contact with.
It was also around this time that the smallpox virus, which stemmed out from the close proximity
of people with cattle, among others in a tidal wave disease emerged from the living conditions in Europe
that allowed for the cultivation of epidemics that claimed the lives of millions of people.
So how come a sneeze conquered the new world?
Because of the drive of discovery and kingdom expansion, the Spanish voyages to the Americas
brought with them conquistadores who were at that time already infected with smallpox and other
European diseases. It was a miracle that these diseases did not die off in the ocean, considering that the
time it takes to travel from Europe to the new world possibly took months, and that during this period the
diseases may have died off considering that there are no new hosts to infect assuming that all the
crewmen have already contracted the disease.
Still possessing the diseases, the European natives reached the Mexican-American shores and
eventually made contact with the American natives. The possibility of a European conquistadores
sneezing whilst making contact with a native is high. Smallpox is a disease that can be contracted through
body fluid contact. And therefore, since the natives have not developed an immunity for this foreign
disease, they fall ill immediately, and this disease spreads to the other members of their tribe, and to other
tribes, eventually causing the deaths of millions of the Mexican-American population.
Ultimately, because of the decline in population of the natives of the new world, the conquest of
the Europeans became a whole lot easier because of the decrease in the resistance of their colonization.
Paired with a more advanced technology and weaponry and the fact that the tribes were independent of
each other, it is indeed a feat that a few hundred or thousand Spanish soldiers were able to colonize the
Americas that had a population that spanned millions. And to think that one of the main contributors of
the colonization was nothing more than a timely sneeze to the face.