General Theory of Alternate History

[William_Dellinger]

I want to talk about butterflies. (I'm putting this in Before 1900 since earlier timelines have more experience with large-scale butterflies. Not that After 1900 doesn't, just that I want to discuss long term butterflies and short-term butterflies). Specifically, butterflies in the context of a change in a given timeline.

How large a net do butterflies cast? Obviously, it would depend on the POD, so let's start there. The bigger the change, the bigger the butterflies, and the faster that they would spread. If Stanislav Petrov isn't in charge on that fateful night in September of 1983, the Soviet Union could have launched a counter attack. This would be a large-scale POD, so we'll call it an Omega Event. A random person choosing to eat cereal instead of making eggs, toast, and waffles on a given morning, is not a big change, so we'll call it an Alpha Event. Butterflies would also depend on where in the world the event happened, and the area/region of the world the focus is taking place. Omega events affect a much larger area, so they have a larger impact; the Soviets launching a full-scale retaliation in 1983 would affect every living person on the world, but a random person taking longer to make breakfast really only affects him, so the latter would have a much smaller impact. Maybe the person is 20 minutes late for work, but that’s not going to have severe consequences. So maybe we can label these Type I (directly affected by POD), Type II (indirectly affected by POD), Type III (eventually affected by POD), Type IV (unaffected by POD). For example, the boll weevil destroyed the cotton crop in the American South and Mexico in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. The South would be Type I, the British textile mills would be Type II, the Asian markets the British were selling to would be Type III, and perhaps Siberia would be Type IV?

How far away does a person have to be born from an Omega level POD to be butterflied away? That would also depend on how closely related they were to the impact of the POD and the nature of butterflies, but I’ll come back to that. If we consider that every person is made from one sperm cell and one egg, then delaying the act of conception by as much as a few seconds could mean an entirely different sperm fertilizes the egg, resulting in a different person. If we stand by this, then no one born after the Omega POD whose parents were either directly or indirectly affected by said POD could exist. If Randolph Churchill is distracted for a half hour or more on a certain night in late January 1874, then Winston Churchill would – genetically – be a different person. Or perhaps could be a different person?

But if it’s a much smaller POD, an Alpha POD, that takes place in remote Siberia – or, better yet, doesn’t have cause any significant change in the timeline for years to come (i.e. Napoleon dies in childhood), then nothing would change for people born on the other side of the world, in the Americas or China, or even Europe for that matter. There are of course things in between both extremes, this should be seen as a spectrum, which is really what I’m getting at.

Take a given POD, such as Thomas Jackson surviving Chancellorsville. Would people born in 1863-1865 in the Northeastern US in OTL be butterflied away? 1865-1870 for the rest of the US? 1870-1880 for Europe, 1880-1900 for Africa and Asia? So that no one born 35 years after a POD will be born in the timeline? What kind of spread pattern are we looking at? How fast? And how do you determine the size and impact of a POD? Can we think of examples? Can we say with certainty that no one born x number of years after a POD would be born in this alternate timeline? Would technological level affect the spread?

Side note: Obviously, all Omega PODs would start off with an Alpha POD (I think; are there any examples of immediate Omega PODs that don’t have a much smaller underlying cause?). Petrov not being in charge in September 1983 would necessarily be a result of him getting a cold, being late, being out of the room, etc. which would make those Alpha PODs that caused an immediate Omega POD. So, which would be the actual point of divergence? Petrov getting a cold on the wrong night, or the Soviet Union nuking the US?

 

[galveston bay]

I like to think of it as the POD causes a gradually expanding series of ripples myself

 

[Captain Jack]

I agree with galveston that the best, or at least my preferred, way of looking at it is as a series of expanding ripples. The ripples of change expand not so much geographically but conceptually. The more closely related an event is to the POD the faster the ripple travels there, and vice versa.

As for yuor question about people being butterflied away, I don't think there's a single answer to that. There certainly isn't a set time limit after which you can state that people will be different. I suppose in part that gets down to a nurture vs. nature dilemma. However, I think of a POD's effect on people as re-rolling the dice. Sure, in this case there are a hell of a lot of dice, but that doesn't mean you're assured of a different result. Ultimately, it comes down to authorial fiat and the timeline author's ability to construct a scenario where both he divergences and convergences seem reasonable.

 

[PhilippeO]

Unless Author deliberately create Butterfly net, any conception after Alpha POD would be different person.

Remember origin quote : flap of butterfly wings could create storm in faraway places.

so if a Nevenk hunter in Siberia killed by meteor in 01 January 1501AD; his non-existence would cause all kind of different movement : running rabbit stop running, birds in area didn't fly because human presence, his body cause splash when fall to ground etc; so 'butterfly' already flap, there will be small change everywhere in the world, a breeze that blow in Missisippi, storm cease a minute shorter in Bengal, calm instead breeze in Kyoto; since there are millions of sperm and even very small change affect who 'win'; anybody who born in 02 January 1501AD would be different person from OTL.

 

[DanMcCollum]

I'm pretty strict with my butterflies. Yes, general trends are going to stay the same for some time (with minor changes 9), but the particular details will be different. This is especially true with human conception - anyone born nine months after the POD is going to, by nature, be a somewhat different person.

 

[Avalon]

I prefer a linkage theory, any changes that happen happens as a result of the change affecting the world. Whether physically, verbally etc. An African kingdom rising in the centre of the continent isn't going to change Genghis Khan being born nor conquering the way he did. For it to affect his birth it has to affect what his parents do up to it from that moment on and with an inability of the news or the people of the kingdom affecting them somehow their lives won't change. They'll go hunting the same, they'll eat the same, they'll sleep the same and the smoosh booties them same. That applies to his conquest he shall never know nor be affected by anything happening in that area, he'll never even be able to talk about it delaying or increasing his time of doing anything in any area.

Of course, you could dream up a series of possible happenings that occur, human or otherwise that do end up changing the Mongol conquests but each event added to the chain only increases the MTTH - Mean Time to Happen. The longer the MTTH is the more time for that ripple to start to affect change and from there people's births can/will be changed but the strength of the ripple is what changes events. Even if an event chain is created to affect Genghis' birth his conquest may stay the same under the same chain. Of course, all of this is decided by what the events on the chain are along with when they start affecting change on the Genghis' and his life.

All this means to me that when deciding:

A. Who is born? Think about your POD and what it changes, when the person should have been conceived about and whether either any news of the change or an event chain could reach their parents between the time of divergence and conception.

B. What events occur? Think about whether an event chain from your POD to any action or event of a person and what if any changes such would actually have on them i.e the early death of a Chinese farmer really does shouldn't change the actions of Henry VIII within any period short of 6-7 years.

TL;DR - The formation of an Amazonian South American native kingdom shouldn't prevent the birth nor death of William III of Sicily if it happened within a certain time period, in this case, 15 - 20 years.

 

[Augenis]

Depends on whether you want to use the butterfly effect for wish fulfillment or not, like many people in this forum often do.

 

[Carp]

Since what we're talking about here is fiction, I'd say it's whatever you want it to be. There is no "science of butterflies," no correct opinion on who would or would not be born if X happened and Y didn't Z days after the fact and so on.

What interests me in alt-history is the logic of the counterfactual: If X happens instead of Y, what changes? Whose lives are changed? How do the people of the time react to it? It's about reasoning from A to B to C, and showing your work by explaining how one might plausibly cause the next. Yes, as time goes on the ripples of the POD become impossible to string together like that and you must settle for interpreting broad historical changes and inventing characters to see them through, but I see no reason to bring on the chaos prematurely by random happenstance right after the POD with such explanations as "a gust of wind" and "the vagaries of human conception." I mean, there's nothing wrong with that if that's your jam, but to me it strays from the original thought experiment of "if X instead of Y, then what?"

 

[SavoyTruffle]

Depends on whether you want to use the butterfly effect for wish fulfillment or not, like many people in this forum often do.

What interests me in alt-history is the logic of the counterfactual: If X happens instead of Y, what changes? Whose lives are changed? How do the people of the time react to it?

Good points. While I do subscribe to chaos theory and the butterfly effect, I do think that cause and effect is far more important, and sometimes butterflies are just used as an excuse for TL writers to favor certain parties. The mark of a good TL writer, IMO, is "to let the story write itself"; that is, letting the processes of cause and effect take their course.

 

[The Professor]

A lot of people do confuse the butterfly effect with probability.
The whole point of the butterfly is changes to the cause-and-effect chains that heighten some outcomes and dampen others NOT changing the probability of everything outside of those chains.

 

[Alcsentre Calanice]

An African kingdom rising in the centre of the continent isn't going to change Genghis Khan being born nor conquering the way he did. For it to affect his birth it has to affect what his parents do up to it from that moment on and with an inability of the news or the people of the kingdom affecting them somehow their lives won't change.

A Kingdom rising in the center of Africa will trade with its neighbors, and the neighbors will trade with their own sourrounding contries. Travelers will die during the wars to found the kingdom; others will never return home. Traders will find new trade opportunities, leading to wealth and poverty in other states. All regions of the earth are, directly or indirectly, connected to each other.

For example, due to such circumstances, an Egyptian tradesman travelling south is killed by the king of your new kingdom. Hearing of the death of his affiliate, an Iraqi merchant makes a trip to Central Asia (instead of visiting Egypt as he usually did). There he sells a beautiful bracelet to a salesman from Samarkand, who shortly afterwards joins a caravan crossing Mongolia. Instead of directly joining her husband, Genghis Khan's mother first buys the bracelet. She then decides to give her husband what he wants, but it's too late - another spermatozoon entered her ovum. Genghis Khan will be born; however, he will be a highly intelligent, but uncharismatic and ugly person. Instead of being a leader, he'll become a demanded advisor.

I needed roughly a year to completly alter history. It all began with the formation of a kingdom in Africa, and it ended with one of the greatest leaders of all time never being born.

We'll never know if the Egyptian merchant, if the bracelet existed. We can't rule it out, we can't prove it. But we don't need to, as long as we are aware of one basic rule: if we alter one detail in human history, there are only very few subsequent events that will remain unchanged.

And, to be honest, the foundation of a kingdom in Africa isn't a minor detail.

 

[The Professor]

It's about tipping points. How much change will alter the next link in the causal chain?
An extra person in the crowd at football game could cause anything from unnoticeable change to the other team winning.
Writers can fixate on having all change noticeable rather than story relevant ones.

 

[Augenis]

A Kingdom rising in the center of Africa will trade with its neighbors, and the neighbors will trade with their own sourrounding contries. Travelers will die during the wars to found the kingdom; others will never return home. Traders will find new trade opportunities, leading to wealth and poverty in other states. All regions of the earth are, directly or indirectly, connected to each other.

For example, due to such circumstances, an Egyptian tradesman travelling south is killed by the king of your new kingdom. Hearing of the death of his affiliate, an Iraqi merchant makes a trip to Central Asia (instead of visiting Egypt as he usually did). There he sells a beautiful bracelet to a salesman from Samarkand, who shortly afterwards joins a caravan crossing Mongolia. Instead of directly joining her husband, Genghis Khan's mother first buys the bracelet. She then decides to give her husband what he wants, but it's too late - another spermatozoon entered her ovum. Genghis Khan will be born; however, he will be a highly intelligent, but uncharismatic and ugly person. Instead of being a leader, he'll become a demanded advisor.

I needed roughly a year to completly alter history. It all began with the formation of a kingdom in Africa, and it ended with one of the greatest leaders of all time never being born.

We'll never know if the Egyptian merchant, if the bracelet existed. We can't rule it out, we can't prove it. But we don't need to, as long as we are aware of one basic rule: if we alter one detail in human history, there are only very few subsequent events that will remain unchanged.

And, to be honest, the foundation of a kingdom in Africa isn't a minor detail.

Well yeah, of course you can butterfly Genghis away if you focus the butterflies on eliminating him. But just as easily all this sequence of events could have not happened at all despite the foundation of a kingdom in central Africa.

See, this is what I mean when I say that butterfly effect to this site is a "get-your-wish-fulfillment-easily free card". In real history, events have logical chains of causes, but since most of them are extremely convoluted and hard to track, not to mention often really, really obscure, it's far easier for an AH writer to just do whatever the hell he wants with the storyline and flash the butterfly effect card both to himself and to all of the readers' questions if they ever come up (which they usually don't, because let's be honest - most people don't read alternate history for hyper-realism anyway).

This is why I think this thread is unnecessary, because there isn't and can never be a "theory" on butterfly effect. It's not a scientific phenomenon, it's a literary trope. Alternate history is not a science, it's a literature genre. And to literature, literary laws apply, which don't necessary follow the scientific method.

 

[Deleted member 97083]

Well yeah, of course you can butterfly Genghis away if you focus the butterflies on eliminating him. But just as easily all this sequence of events could have not happened at all despite the foundation of a kingdom in central Africa.

See, this is what I mean when I say that butterfly effect to this site is a "get-your-wish-fulfillment-easily free card". In real history, events have logical chains of causes, but since most of them are extremely convoluted and hard to track, not to mention often really, really obscure, it's far easier for an AH writer to just do whatever the hell he wants with the storyline and flash the butterfly effect card both to himself and to all of the readers' questions if they ever come up (which they usually don't, because let's be honest - most people don't read alternate history for hyper-realism anyway).

This is why I think this thread is unnecessary, because there isn't and can never be a "theory" on butterfly effect. It's not a scientific phenomenon, it's a literary trope. Alternate history is not a science, it's a literature genre. And to literature, literary laws apply, which don't necessary follow the scientific method.

Actually the butterfly effect is a real scientific thing in weather modeling, simulation, and chaos theory, it isn't just a literary trope.

Otherwise, I agree. The author using the alternate history or comic book version of the butterfly effect, rather than the chaos theory version, generally uses it as an ad hoc literary device. In that case it depends on the work of fiction in question.

 

[Augenis]

Actually the butterfly effect is a real scientific thing in weather modeling, simulation, and chaos theory, it isn't just a literary trope.

Otherwise, I agree. The author using the alternate history or comic book version of the butterfly effect, rather than the chaos theory version, generally uses it as an ad hoc literary device. In that case it depends on the work of fiction in question.

Yeah, that's why I said "to this site". Of course, I didn't mean the scientific phenomena, only the term AH.com uses.

 

[Pyramus]

A lot of people do confuse the butterfly effect with probability.
The whole point of the butterfly is changes to the cause-and-effect chains that heighten some outcomes and dampen others NOT changing the probability of everything outside of those chains.

I disagree.
My philosophy on the butterfly effect is that it resets probability.
Like a coin flipped in Britain a minute after Lincoln was shot won't always land the same way if John Wilks Booth misses, as the coin had an equal probability of landing on either heads or tails and for all intents and purposes it's being flipped a second time.

 

[The Professor]

I disagree.
My philosophy on the butterfly effect is that it resets probability.
Like a coin flipped in Britain a minute after Lincoln was shot won't always land the same way if John Wilks Booth misses, as the coin had an equal probability of landing on either heads or tails and for all intents and purposes it's being flipped a second time.

Then you're misusing the term butterfly effect.

 

[Avalon]

Snip.

I did admit that you could connect everything in some way but any connection must be logical and follow a link, they can't just be happenstance and probability because that's not what butterflies are, they're a knock on effect changing everything by altering B and then B altering C etc. I also said that eventually something could change altering Genghis' parents actions but the establishment of a central African kingdom won't have enough knock-on effects within any period of at least 5 years for a good reason. Africa is huge.

An Egyptian merchant is never going to travel that far, he'll stop at Timbuktu and wait for any goods he needs to travel up north him through the West African kingdoms. Such a journey in that time would have taken months if not years. The war is unlikely to directly affect him and if he does try to go further into the continent his death is unlikely to be relayed to anyone he knows in any way. Assuming that Iraqi merchant finds out his death it will be in Egypt not in Iraq, who's going to tell him there assuming they even heard about it? He will go to Egypt as normal and somehow find out about the death of an affiliate. He will still most likely trade and won't leave immediately because he has come here for a reason - to make money as he usually does (also the death of his affiliate won't stop him from coming to Egypt, it just means he lost a favoured and ideal trading partner but not the only trading partner).

Assuming he still decides to go to Central Asia instead of Egypt for some reason he still has to make a very long journey that may or may not be worth the risk which as a merchant he weighs carefully. Even today that journey is at least a month alone by foot, add caravans and take us back 800 years the trip is now months long. When/if he makes it there and sells the bracelet the journey to Mongolia is going to be one of similar if not increased length. Now if Genghis' mother actually does even stop for the bracelet is up to her.

All of these events assuming they aligned just right could happen but they won't be changing his birth within a year in anyway. That's why I said that any changes should be thought over with the end goal being organic writing not changing X because of the fact you can. Very few things can remain unchanged not will that's what we should remember. You could create multiple ways to do multiple things but knock-on effect from one thing to another but each link in a chain increase the time needed to effect change. The conceptions of any people in an alternate history should be thought as in such a way of, how does the POD affect the act. I personally like the OP's Alpha and Omega system as it makes the most sense to me regarding the knock-on effect system.

Also, I never said it was a minor detail.

 

[Alcsentre Calanice]

but any connection must be logical and follow a link

Sure. But think of your own life - how much could have gone different if a fly flew in your room on one day and, by annoying you, prevented that you became interested in alternate history? Or if this fly didn't fly in your room, and prevented that you became interested in alternate history?

And the behaviour of this fly might be altered by a (minor) POD very close to the point when she flies into your room.

 

[Avalon]

Sure. But think of your own life - how much could have gone differently if a fly flew in your room on one day and, by annoying you, prevented that you became interested in alternate history? Or if this fly didn't fly in your room, and prevented that you became interested in alternate history?

And the behaviour of this fly might be altered by a (minor) POD very close to the point when she flies into your room.

Any fly that does that has to change a plethora of things from my ability to care, where I was in the house along with my base interest in history. I do see what you mean though, granted any POD occurring within a ten-kilometre radius of you should most likely change something in your life if not, depending on its strength, everything so you are right there. Though if the POD came from the Australian outback the fly isn't going to change what I do within a period of a year or two.

Like a coin flipped in Britain a minute after Lincoln was shot won't always land the same way if John Wilks Booth misses, as the coin had an equal probability of landing on either heads or tails and for all intents and purposes it's being flipped a second time.

Anything happening a minute after Lincoln was or was not shot won't change the events happening in Philadelphia much less London. For something to change the way the coin was flipped it has the way the thumb was positioned the strength applied and the angle of the hand along with a mass of other variables. The people flipping the coin won't know about the shooting, and the effects of the attempt won't have reached them at all, they are no reasons for the events around them to change the way they input the variables so there is no way for the outcome to change.