I can't imagine that anyone out there would deny that the development of the Maxim gun had a profound effect on the history of warfare and, therefore, on the way the world is today. It follows, then, that had it emerged 80 years earlier than it did, and in France, the final score at Waterloo would have been rather different and the course of European development would now place us all somewhere else. I'm not saying it would necessarily be better or worse, just that it would be utterly changed.

This is a fairly well-known historian's parlour game and fairly pointless in itself, but it's a good way of grading the relevance of things and happenings. How different would the world be had the technique for mass-producing consistent iron using coke instead of charcoal been a Swedish achievement (they had all the good iron ore, after all) rather than an English one? It's impossible to know exactly, but we can be sure the answer is "quite a lot".

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Had J S Bach, Picasso and Einstein all died in bicycle accidents as children, the nature of human thought would have taken a different course; more so than if, for example, the Beatles had been Japanese. The English Civil War has had more profound repercussions than the invention of the toasted teacake, but both played a role in making our lives what they are today.

Everything – it's a theme science fiction writers love – has an influence on what is to come, even, probably, the debate over the length of Richard Hammond's hair. It is merely a matter of magnitude.

This brings me to my forthcoming magnum opus, which I intend to present to the Royal Society: First meditations on the insignificance of supercars by Dr May, who may be found at the sign of ye Croff Keyf, Londinium.

We have established before in this column that the supercar is pretty useless in the role of a car. No one on the web page seems to have disagreed, not like they did with the contention that the Me 109 would have been a better defensive fighter in the Battle of Britain.

But the problem is bigger than we might think. Most supercar road tests allude to the glorious irrelevance of such things and hint heavily at the requirement to abandon rational thought when selecting something like a Veyron. But no one has yet had the Cromwellian courage to pronounce the supercar utterly pointless regardless of the means of analysis.

Italy, to my mind, is still the home of the true supercar, because it makes Ferraris and Lambos. But what benefit has accrued to Italy, principal arbour of the mechanism of the Renaissance, by their existence? None that I can discern, beyond a small entry in the economic administration of the regions that produce them. I reckon France was shaped more by the croissant than Italy was by the F40.

Hence my study. Nothing I can think of produces a greater disparity when usefulness is compared with imagined import. Not even nylon bed linen. How can I be sure? By reviewing real history and recurring scenarios, and then attempting to imagine how they could be manipulated by the presence of a supercar or its owner. You can help me with this.

Is there any sort of "My kingdom for a supercar" moment? I don't think so. Supercars would not have prevented the plague, accelerated the industrial revolution, instigated women's suffrage, advanced the space race, or produced one extra piano sonata from Beethoven. The Gallardo could not have altered the course of medical development and the Ferrari 458 would have had no bearing whatsoever on early 20th-century conceptual physics.

Let's be a little more down to earth about it. In the production of great drama, did any playwright or film director ever charge a distraught woman with the role of running into a room and crying: "Does anyone here own a supercar?" They usually want a doctor. Was progress in science and the humanities ever arrested by the absence of one? I don't think so. Would the Titanic still have sunk if the world had known about Koenigsegg? Yes it would.

This is what fascinates me. If we take any other artefact – the breech-loading rifle, penicillin, radio, Gore-Tex or even the adjustable spanner – we can insert it into an earlier age or remove it from a later one and change the world. The same goes for historic achievements and ground-breaking philosophy. If we move the work of Nicolaus Copernicus around the centuries, we can distort the sphere of the human condition. We can probably do the same by tampering with the discovery of bicarbonate of soda.

But we can't do it with the Lotus Esprit.

Cutting edge technologies first appear in race cars usually, then they filter down to supercars and eventually filter down to common production cars.

Supercars are necessary because the push the automotive industry forward in terms of technology, performance, fuel economy, and the list goes on and on.