Firewall of Butterflies

Ok, let's first define what I meant by butterflies. The Turtledove version is low key. If an OTL marriage happens after the POD and they have similar environments, then they will have kids, some of which will be in the genetic ballpark of their OTL counterparts for example. In other words, weak and none of that chaos theory thing. As someone once said, OTL is basically like a flawed model of TTL history after a POD, but it's the model we most know and for people not immediately affected by the POD it's probably a good approximation.

I was thinking about a 530s POD which affects the rulers of the area of Persia and the Levant to make Oriental Orthodox Christianity popular among the higher class and have it maintain there after muslim conquest. Or rather in TTL, it would be the local rulers submitting to the Muslims in exchange for autonomy and some concessions.

I want some places to develop similarly to OTL. Japan shouldn't have a problem considering it is an island nation and eventually it will cut itself from the outside world on its own volition. The area around modern day Kenya is a bit trickier since they are next to Abyssinia, but the latter is not directly affected by the POD although they will have communications with overlords of the Persia Levanant area. The most annoying is the Holy Roman Empire, Scandinavia, Iberia, and England. Those that have a land connection that is easily traveled to the area affected by the POD (as opposed to Egypt where long distance travel in the south happens little at this time, even on the Nile only intermittently and low volume). How can I keep events in that region very close to OTL plausibly for 600 years?
 
How can I keep events in that region very close to OTL plausibly for 600 years?

You can't.

For example, a 530s POD in Persia or the Levant would certainly butterfly Muhammad's existence, as his parents certainly weren't married yet in the 530s.

That changes everything and makes it unrecognizable.
 
One way of avoiding butterfly arguments is to make it clear that your TL is hewing as close as possible to OTL.
Afterall if you throw a stone into a rippling pond not all the ripples are destroyed - some are enhanced and some unchanged.
Some ATL people will fulfil the roles of OTL people to such an extent that unless you're examining their appearance closely it doesn't matter that they are different. For your purposes they are the same.
Basically just saying "OTL unless I otherwise justify" is good enough for all but the butterfly purists.

Edit: or to be exacter "looks like OTL unless I justify otherwise".
 
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One way of avoiding butterfly arguments is to make it clear that your TL is hewing as close as possible to OTL.
Afterall if you throw a stone into a rippling pond not all the ripples are destroyed - some are enhanced and some unchanged.
Some ATL people will fulfil the roles of OTL people to such an extent that unless you're examining their appearance closely it doesn't matter that they are different. For your purposes they are the same.
Basically just saying "OTL unless I otherwise justify" is good enough for all but the butterfly purists.

Edit: or to be exacter "looks like OTL unless I justify otherwise".

True. The author has control over the actions of the historical characters, as long as it is logical and consistent, he could get away with it.
 
You can't.

For example, a 530s POD in Persia or the Levant would certainly butterfly Muhammad's existence, as his parents certainly weren't married yet in the 530s.

That changes everything and makes it unrecognizable.
It doesn't have to though.
What's wrong with choosing the universe that's as close to ours as reasonable?
Especially if the aim is to contrast it with ours.
 
True. The author has control over the actions of the historical characters, as long as it is logical and consistent, he could get away with it.

Yeah I know that. Consistency is the easier part. I'm just wondering how I'm going to logically have characters like Henry V Holy Roman Emperor (investiture controversy), William the Bastard (He promised me the throne, nevermind England's succession laws don't allow it to be parceled like a duchy), Kings of England England at all (oh... yeah the 530 is before the Britions lost to the Anglo-Saxons and fell back to Cornwall and Brittany), and so on if Persia and the Levant switched majority religions.
 
Yeah I know that. Consistency is the easier part. I'm just wondering how I'm going to logically have characters like Henry V Holy Roman Emperor (investiture controversy), William the Bastard (He promised me the throne, nevermind England's succession laws don't allow it to be parceled like a duchy), Kings of England England at all (oh... yeah the 530 is before the Britions lost to the Anglo-Saxons and fell back to Cornwall and Brittany), and so on if Persia and the Levant switched majority religions.
Well, logically the events that lead to those later events aren't necessarily altered to make them impossible to occur. A shift of 79.43 to 78.92% likely still rounds to 79%.
 
We could treat alternate history just like thought experiment, then we could ignore '9 months rule', so birth of John Calvin after failed Columbus' expedition is entirely possible. If we follow chaos theory approach, then Calvin is impossible with POD more than 9 months before his birth. We could create another reformer in ATL, with slightly different views and different name, but doing it to every single person born post-POD could be really annoying.
 
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We could treat alternate history just like thought experiment. Then birth of John Calvin after failed Columbus' expedition. If we follow chaos theory approach, then John Calvin is impossible with POD more than 9 months before his birth. We could create another reformer in ATL, with slightly different views and different name, but doing it to every single person born post-POD could be really annoying.
Not impossible just equally probable with the countless other possible children born to his parents.
 
Yes, not impossible, but as unlikely as having two identical kids, who are not twins.
Thing is everyone is improbable when you look at the possibilities but we still exist.
Having similar people in TLs where their parents still exist and have children isn't a bad way of writing a TL. Having some events go like OTL isn't bad either. The best TLs highlight whether similar events could occur similar to OTL. That's hard to do if you've made everyone completely different.
 
The use of similar personalities born after the POD (even with the same name) is permissible under at least two circumstances. First, not much time has elapsed between the POD and the character's parents conceiving the character and said parents are only weakly or not at all affected by the POD. For example its hard to see why in TL where Columbus fails there should be any effect visible in say China in 1493. No information has changed there, therefore OTL and ATL in alt-China should be exactly the same at least until some traveler finally makes it to alt-China and things begin to diverge.

Second, even a major POD will have no effect even many years later if there is no exchange of information between the ATL location and some other location. As an example, in a world where Alexander the Great lives to 60, quite a bit of European and Middle Eastern history will likely be radically changed but (unless someone makes it to the New World before 1600) Powhattan and Massasoit will still exist with the same names and the same genetics as IOTL.

Turtledove does irritating things by totally ignoring the butterfly effect at times. Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon turn up in "The Two Georges" 200 years after a failed American Revolution. That ruined the story for me because of its unbelievability.
 
Turtledove does irritating things by totally ignoring the butterfly effect at times. Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon turn up in "The Two Georges" 200 years after a failed American Revolution. That ruined the story for me because of its unbelievability.

Wait what? Man, I forgot that dumb thing.

Anyways, my ATL location and Western Europe have some information exchange, that's my trouble. For example I don't need the William the Bastard, but I wanted someone speaking his dialect who takes over England because of a promise the last king allegedly made who looks like... our William the Bastard.
 
It's alternate history. There are no rules. As long as your work is internally consistent you can do whatever the hell you want regardless of what others believe about butterflies.
 
The use of similar personalities born after the POD (even with the same name) is permissible under at least two circumstances. First, not much time has elapsed between the POD and the character's parents conceiving the character and said parents are only weakly or not at all affected by the POD. For example its hard to see why in TL where Columbus fails there should be any effect visible in say China in 1493. No information has changed there, therefore OTL and ATL in alt-China should be exactly the same at least until some traveler finally makes it to alt-China and things begin to diverge.

Second, even a major POD will have no effect even many years later if there is no exchange of information between the ATL location and some other location. As an example, in a world where Alexander the Great lives to 60, quite a bit of European and Middle Eastern history will likely be radically changed but (unless someone makes it to the New World before 1600) Powhattan and Massasoit will still exist with the same names and the same genetics as IOTL.

Turtledove does irritating things by totally ignoring the butterfly effect at times. Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon turn up in "The Two Georges" 200 years after a failed American Revolution. That ruined the story for me because of its unbelievability.
If we are really strict with Chaos Theory, then we'd have butterflies in Mexico just few weeks after failed Norman invasion of England, due to masses of air moving differently (this is whole 'butterfly flapping wings in Brazil cause storm in Texas two weeks later' explaination of butterfly effect).

But if we follow multiverse theory, there is unlimited number of worlds, so even extremaly unlikely events would happen in some of them, after all what are chances that 'our' reformer *Paul Fossard*, who appears in 'no Calvin' world, would be exactly like we described him?
 
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It's alternate history. There are no rules. As long as your work is internally consistent you can do whatever the hell you want regardless of what others believe about butterflies.
This.

Alternate history is not science (even if some people in this site like to interpret it that way). It's a genre of literature, and literature has this thing where it doesn't have to follow rules or scientific laws at all.

I saw members above mention Turtledove and how he casts butterfly nets over everything. Sure, it makes no sense from a probability standpoint, having OTL people be born 200 years after the point of divergence and all - but I forgive this because of, in this case, Rule of Cool. After all, The Two Georges is a story about a British America in present day, so wouldn't it be cool to learn about how these people we know so much about are faring in this alternate universe, how did their lives change? Finding out about alternate historical people is always more interesting than finding out about TTL people whose names were chosen with a random name generator.
 
I have long held that the Cult of the Strong Butterfly is based on a half baked analysis. That is--it is true that gazillions of separate TLs radiate from a single moment, and each one has cascading, exponentially growing chaotic differences from its kindred TLs. Fine, but the whole paradigm of Alternate History implicitly endorses the Many Worlds interpretation; every possible timeline that could exist, does exist, "out there" somewhere.

Therefore we can specify TLs exist that would have developed quite differently than ours, but for some gross POD that differs markedly from OTL's past, but in other respects, that are purely chaotic and not cause and effect related by logic to the differences caused by the POD, chaos can be chosen to cancel out. A gazillion different TLs radiate away from a divergence from a TL similar to ours up to that point--but not identical, because the purely chaotic events that would have happened were it not for the POD, would have been different. Say I want I TL where Hitler died in the Great War--some stray bullet catches him during a courier run and he becomes just another near anonymous victim. Well, do a POD to the POD--that stray bullet is deflected and misses him and he proceeds just as in OTL. But the whole world he is in was subtly different than our OTL corresponding moment, and so if we neutralize the POD different sperm hits different eggs and none of the people of OTL born in 1960 are born in his TL, even though the Weimar Republic, the Depression, WWII, the Cold War and all that happen much as OTL--but my father is never born in 1942, someone else is born to my paternal grandparents and meanwhile my mother is even farther from existing and I am "replaced" by someone completely different. That's if the POD is prevented because really this TL has never corresponded exactly to OTL at all. But, thanks to the chaotic ripples that radiate from the POD, thanks to shifted weather patterns and all that same chaos the site Church teaches you means you can never have corresponding people 30 years after a POD--eggs, sperm, all that--it just so happens that thanks to that same chaos, this particular chosen ATL out of all the gazillions of other candidate ATLs that look similar to it to us, happens to be the one where the POD we want, Hitler dead in a WWI trench, is associated with the one in gazillion chance variations of meaningless chaotic events that brings the TL as close as logically possible to OTL except for the logical consequences of the POD. Hitler's deeds in overt history had largely affected the world by the time my grandfather met my grandmother, presumably jazz music would be different and hence popular big bang stuff and boogie-woogie or whatever my conservative young grandparents liked to groove to in 1940 Kenosha Wisconsin, would also be different, in a world without Hitler mucking things up in the 1920s and '30s over in Germany, without the gathering clouds of the storm about to break--that had broken, and sent refugees scurrying, already in Germany itself...America must be somewhat different by logic without that cloud gathering than with it in the late '30s and with the storm already started in 1940. Yet, is it possible that two young Wisconsin residents not yet born when ATL Hitler dies, could be very close to my OTL grandparents, close in genes (almost certainly possible!), close in personality, mentality, circumstances, close enough that a man with the exact or nearly so genes as my father is born the day, in his TL, Jimmy Doolittle is not orchestrating the launch of bombers to strike at Japan from a carrier deck, because in his world the Japanese, in a world where the USA is not distracted by the Third Reich in Europe (and neither are France or Britain), decide it would be foolish to sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and therefore the USA, by this time having elected someone other than FDR to the Presidency since he's already had two terms, is not at war with anybody, certainly not Japan? But it is still my father, even though his infancy is necessarily different because his father is right there instead of fighting a grim war in Africa and southwest Europe for the next three years, growing up with the same experiences pretty much to become the man I knew as my father, while way over in Los Angeles my mother is born a couple years later. All the other people in the world similarly parallel OTL people as much as possible--not because a bad writer never heard of butterflies, but because we have chosen to examine the no-Hitler POD from a source TL, not our own past but another one kind of similar, that happens to send out one of a gazillion consequent TLs that happens to parallel our modern OTL as closely as it logically can, just by chance for the "just by chance" events. The odds against one coincidence are low, the odds against two of them are low squared, the odds against uncounted quadrillions of them are inconceivably low---but the number of timelines to choose from is inconceivably higher than the reciprocal of that, and we can simply choose to study the one world that happens to meet our specifications.

It would be quite a challenge to justify my existence, logically, in a world with no WWII. Everything seems so shaped by it. But I would not let mere butterfly theory stop me from trying if I were deeply moved to pursue the project. If it can happen, it has, out there in the multiverse somewhere, all we need to do is take some notes and pictures.

And while that TL is wildly improbable, it is not less so than our own.
 
With a POD before the Heian era, it's just as ridiculous to assume Japan will inevitably close itself off from the world as it is to assume that Britain will inevitably rule over a quarter of the world (including all of India).
 
With a POD before the Heian era, it's just as ridiculous to assume Japan will inevitably close itself off from the world as it is to assume that Britain will inevitably rule over a quarter of the world (including all of India).

Actually easier than my original request. There is no reason for Britain to rule a quarter of the world and it's not inevitable... but an alternate sequence of events of a Royal Navy and world dominance can come. In contrast, it's harder for a 530s POD to keep western Europe close enough to have simmilair characters. Any sequence of events that is plausible?
 
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