Is it possible for the death of a single peasant to change history appreciably?

I think the Butterfly Effect is way overstated usually, but a peasant dying could easily change history - although with a small liklihood of an immediate change.

But it could even cause an immediate change. Maybe a peasant is killed that is great at training horses, and is replaced by an inferior trainer, resulting in the king being thrown from his horse and killed.
 
I think the Butterfly Effect is way overstated usually, but a peasant dying could easily change history - although with a small liklihood of an immediate change.

But it could even cause an immediate change. Maybe a peasant is killed that is great at training horses, and is replaced by an inferior trainer, resulting in the king being thrown from his horse and killed.

I like the way that you complain about how the butterfly effect is "overstated" then immediately go on to explain how the butterfly effect works. :D

And the butterfly effect works. I'm not sure how people keep missing the obvious chain of logic between "dynamic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions" to "history is a dynamic system" to "if you change it in the past, history changes." If you step on a butterfly, history will change, and very very fast. Gyuuugh.
 
And the butterfly effect works. I'm not sure how people keep missing the obvious chain of logic between "dynamic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions" to "history is a dynamic system" to "if you change it in the past, history changes." If you step on a butterfly, history will change, and very very fast. Gyuuugh.

I think that some of the opposition to the butterfly effect comes from people who lean more toward the view that history is driven by broad, impersonal forces. In this view, even if you remove an important individual, there will likely be someone else who steps in to fill a very similar role. On a larger scale, even if you change one life and 200 years down the line millions of people are genetically different from OTL, these people will still be effected by the same general trends and almost all of them will still end up playing pretty much the same roles that their OTL counterparts did. In this view of history, individual personality and achievement just isn't that important compared to long-term economic, social, cultural, demographic, etc., trends.

I don't really follow this view myself, but some people do.
 
Most of this thread has been "Here's a scenario in which a famous historical event was directly influenced by the actions of a peasant" or "This famous person was a direct descendent of a peasant". But these are too specific--there does not have to be any direct connection. If a peasant dies, everyone in the village will act differently for the rest of their lives. This will have effects on anyone who interacts with the village, and they will interact differently at the other villages, and anyone changing from any of these villages will alter the dynamic of any army they're in (plus, the whole next generation will be totally different), thus turning a battle--but the battle itself will probably be butterflied away, anyway, because the weather is itself a chaotic system, extremely sensitive to the kinds of variations we already have.

In short, you're pretty much all right, but providing examples just narrows the scope of the effect.
 
I think that some of the opposition to the butterfly effect comes from people who lean more toward the view that history is driven by broad, impersonal forces. In this view, even if you remove an important individual, there will likely be someone else who steps in to fill a very similar role. On a larger scale, even if you change one life and 200 years down the line millions of people are genetically different from OTL, these people will still be effected by the same general trends and almost all of them will still end up playing pretty much the same roles that their OTL counterparts did. In this view of history, individual personality and achievement just isn't that important compared to long-term economic, social, cultural, demographic, etc., trends.

I don't really follow this view myself, but some people do.

Who said history has no rules? If a system doesn't have rules, it's not chaotic, it's just white noise. Rules don't prevent a system from being chaotic; they just mean it will be chaotic in more interesting ways.

The thing is, weather - the quintessential, Platonic ideal of chaotic systems - has rules and vast, impersonal forces too. Hurricanes revolve according to the rules of Coriolis force. The winds near the Equator run east and the ones in the Fifties run west. The earth spins and the seasons turn and the Milankovitch cycles wobble. There are good hard laws to weather. But it's still a chaotic system - if a butterfly flaps its wings hurricanes will still come west out of the mid-Atlantic, but they'll be different hurricanes.

IMO, it's the same way with history. Empires will rise and empires will fall; cities will grow at fords and harbours; horse nomads will sweep inexorably off the steppe (until the peasantry get their act together with guns). But who's doing it in each case will vary widly and unpredictably. Maybe the Po valley is decreed by the VIF of H as a good place for trade; but that still leaves vast scope for changes. Maybe it's full of Romance city states; maybe it's united as an emirate of the Caliphate of Rome; hell, maybe it's a burned-out smoldering wreck where the Khan of Europe tethers his horses, for a couple of decades before the Mongol empire crumbles and agriculturalists move back onto the land - the Mongols have got some pretty nice VIF of H on their side too. Which will it be? We don't know. We can't know.

And once you accept that, that even within the scope of sweeping rules there's room for a lot of different things (and you should, because it's true), then it's a short step to "history, vast impersonal forces and all, is still a dynamic system" and once you get there sensitivity to initial conditions (eg, "kill a peasant -> things change a lot") is guarenteed. Kill Jean Blow in Langedoc in 1063 and - be he ever so insignificant - things will change. Maybe the 13th C will see the Great Khan riding through the wreckage of Milan, or an Emir on the river Arno, or even a bunch of people in city-states speaking not-quite-Latin. But whatever it is, it won't be OTL because it can't be; give it two hundred years and it won't even resemble OTL much, I assure you. That's just not how dynamic systems work.
 
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Susano

Banned
I dont think we need to look at chaos theory, even, even if that is where the term comes from. Its just logical thinking that any change of history has, aside the large consequences also uncountable small effects, changes to OTL on their own, that build up over time.
 
Hi! I was reading all of these ideas where a king dies early and history changes. So, it occurred to me: supposed an unnamed, unrecorded peasant dies in the year AD 500 in France. Could the death of an individual peasant change history?
That reminds me of some SF time-travel stories where they abduct supposedly unimportant individuals from the past, in the belief their disappearance won't make much of a difference. Suppose they were wrong? Like in "Ugly Little Boy", where the person
abducted could only be returned to the date of their abduction PLUS the interval of their stay in in the present. That might mean little in the case of a neandertal boy, but they supposedly kidnapped a
peasant (from the middle ages) just after the neandertal.
 
Hi! I was reading all of these ideas where a king Could the death of an individual peasant change history? If so, how?
ACG
Genetics. Even a king can have aa peasant for biological ancestor because any of is female ancestors can have had an extra-marital
affair with a peasant. If the affair was never discovered, there is a huge number of possible consequences of the peasant ancestry in the king's genetic heritage. For instance, his peasant genes can make the king either more or less
resistant to certain disease. He may ether live or die for having (or not) this nameless individual in his biological ancestry. And that is no butterfly, but a direct effect!
 
That reminds me of some SF time-travel stories where they abduct supposedly unimportant individuals from the past, in the belief their disappearance won't make much of a difference. Suppose they were wrong? Like in "Ugly Little Boy", where the person abducted could only be returned to the date of their abduction PLUS the interval of their stay in in the present. That might mean little in the case of a neandertal boy, but they supposedly kidnapped a peasant (from the middle ages) just after the neandertal.
In that particular story, they explain that the changes will occur, but they'll cancel each other out after a while.
 
In that particular story, they explain that the changes will occur, but they'll cancel each other out after a while.

That just take into account the overall, long-term
contribution of the peasant's genes. If the peasant
was going to have a son who would be the lover of noblewoman who will beget the king, then there is no way for the random shuffling of genes to replace the genes he would have supplied. The king is going to be a very different person, with the different set of genes, either from the lady's lawful husband or from another lover. The lady may even not have a son at all, pushing the crown
to some other prince.
 
Well, what if, say, the peasant who died was the ancestor of, say, Isaac Newton? Or Charles Babbage? Or, I don't know, Albert Einstein? We would not be at our current level ot technological and scientific knowledge, thus causing history to take an entirely different course. I probably wouldn't have been born, and neither would the people who set up this website. So.

Take out Newton and you still have Leibnitz to advance modern math. Some changes will "self heal" as vacancies in the scholarly halls are filled by others.

Einstein, though, might be one of the most difficult to replace without derailing technology.
 
Take out Newton and you still have Leibnitz to advance modern math. Some changes will "self heal" as vacancies in the scholarly halls are filled by others.

Einstein, though, might be one of the most difficult to replace without derailing technology.

I dunno about that - Special Relativity was in the air in the 1900s. General Relativity was definitely all Einstein, yes - but you only need Special to do all the useful stuff with nukes etc.
 
Take out Newton and you still have Leibnitz to advance modern maths.

Einstein, though, might be one of the most difficult to replace without derailing technology.

If Newton was never born, general relativity never happens, because Einstein worked out his theory in response to a letter from a man called Eddington, who knew that Mercury's orbit didn't conform to Newton's law. Einstein's theory has driven most of our modern understanding of the universe. Hence, we would be about 200 years behind our modern scientific understanding of the universe.
 
If Newton was never born, general relativity never happens, because Einstein worked out his theory in response to a letter from a man called Eddington, who knew that Mercury's orbit didn't conform to Newton's law. Einstein's theory has driven most of our modern understanding of the universe. Hence, we would be about 200 years behind our modern scientific understanding of the universe.
Oh, don't be silly. Newton not existing might have held up physics for a decade or two, but someone (probably multiple someones) would have done his work. Calculus was independently developed by Leibnitz, and once the tools are in place, someone, possible Laplace, would figure out gravitation and the laws of motion.
 
Based on the discussion this thread has generated, it seems there are two camps regarding the butterfly effect. In camp one, the butterfly effect changes history at both a micro level and the macro level. After the POD, not only will completely different people be born and make completely different decisions, etc, on a micro level, but at the macro level, civilizations will be unrecognizably altered, knowledge and technologies will be altered, and so really nothing resembling the same world will exist once the butterfly effect has run its course. Camp two seems to be that the butterfly effect will change history at the micro level such that certain leaders, kings, warriors, generals, inventors, statemen, etc. won't exist because of our POD, but at the macro level, the butterflied alternate world still looks very similar to the OTL world.

I haven't been on this site that long, but is that the basic argument? If so, put me down as one who is in camp two.
 
Oh, don't be silly. Newton not existing might have held up physics for a decade or two, but someone (probably multiple someones) would have done his work. Calculus was independently developed by Leibnitz, and once the tools are in place, someone, possible Laplace, would figure out gravitation and the laws of motion.

Agreed. Given the number of years between calculus and relativity, there is little question somebody else would have established the equations of gravity and discovered the discrepancy in the orbit of Mercury.

But Einstein had yet other scientific discrepancies to resolve. By the late nineteenth century, it became possible to measure the speed of light down to quite a few decimal places, using the rotating slotted wheel and mirror. Experiments were conducted with star light from a star positioned so the earth was approaching it at orbital speed one time of the year and receding six months later. The test would have been accurate enough to show if the speed of light was additive with that of the earth, and it wasn't. Thus, the laws of additive velocity (Newton's or otherwise) did not hold.

Another paradox was the sun's energy source. Geologists were digging up dinosaur bones and examining rock strata, claiming the age of the earth as hundreds millions of years. If the sun's energy had come from conventional combustion, as was classically thought, it would not have enough mass to burn for millennia. An unknown process produced the sun's energy.

Without Einstein, the discoveries and correlations would have been made later, but it this man did resolve several paradoxes of science with a single theory. Had radioactivity (under research by Curie, Becquerel and others) been industrialized before relativity was understood, some significant, if not disastrous, results could have ensued.
 
Based on the discussion this thread has generated, it seems there are two camps regarding the butterfly effect. In camp one, the butterfly effect changes history at both a micro level and the macro level. After the POD, not only will completely different people be born and make completely different decisions, etc, on a micro level, but at the macro level, civilizations will be unrecognizably altered, knowledge and technologies will be altered, and so really nothing resembling the same world will exist once the butterfly effect has run its course. Camp two seems to be that the butterfly effect will change history at the micro level such that certain leaders, kings, warriors, generals, inventors, statemen, etc. won't exist because of our POD, but at the macro level, the butterflied alternate world still looks very similar to the OTL world.

I haven't been on this site that long, but is that the basic argument? If so, put me down as one who is in camp two.

In the case of the death of a peasant, the macro effect is highly delayed, compared to the case of the defeat of a king, president or military leader. Sure, the butterflies of a POD ultimately bring a "camp one" divergence, where none of the historical figures are the same. But in the case of the peasant, it might take decades for society to take on significant differences.
 
Well, if the peasant were Clement Paston....

... You'd not know, would you, how much was missed. And that, of course, is the problem, a rather Schrodingerian one.
 
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