On the Butterfly, or "How much does it matter if we have this discussion or not?"

[Elfwine]

Obviously the consequences of this discussion are going to be in the Post-1900 forum, if there are any.

But on to business.

I must say I fundamentally disagree with the premise of this thread. All butterflies have consequence by definition. According the the theory of alternate history, even the most minor change imaginable, say, a bug being in the wrong place and being stepped on, will have consequences that create an alternate timeline.
Allow me to provide another example,

The absence of a Habsburg lip.

This is a trait passed on to the Habsburgs after their union with the line of Valois-Burgundy. Phillip the Bold first displayed this trait, and passed it on to all his Habsburg heirs. To butterfly away the Habsburg lip, Mary the Rich needs to marry someone else, creating a drastically different Europe with a different balance of power.
Scipio

I predict a 15-page argument between you and Elfwine.

Because this is an issue that has a huge impact on our understanding of the writing of alt-history, it probably bears discussion - though hopefully more in the way of an exchange of ideas than two irreconcilable positions shouting at each other. I kind of hope there's something other than finding out Sciopio and I basically agree by page 2, however, because wrestling with this idea is one of the tricky parts of writing good AH.


First off, it goes without saying that of course if you (don't) step on a bug, it creates an alternate timeline. If only Julius Caesar hadn't stepped on an ant, that ant would have gone on to...be stepped on by someone else. Maybe Mark Anthony. And if Mark Anthony stepped on that ant, he would...have stepped on an ant that OTL was stepped on by Caesar. Which would mean...absolutely nothing. But it would be different than OTL because the bug died at the hands of Julius Caesar.

If we try really hard we can come up with a way that stepping on that ant would be a cause for other effects, a trigger for those familiar with event programming in PC games.

But that's not the point. We all know what the lost horseshoe nail did, so even seemingly insignificant changes can turn out to be very significant.

Would Julius Caesar stepping on an ant cause the battle of Tannenberg to never happen? I say no.

But there are also less extreme examples. For instance, would Alexius II doing what he's done in my timeline (for the 99% of the site which hasn't read it, he helps the Third Crusade) make any difference to events in Mesoamerica at that time?

Again: No. There is no direct (Alexius doing this causes that) or indirect (Alexius causes an event from OTL not to happen, which means that what does happen is an event that leads to that) connection between events in Anatolia and the Levant and events in Mesoamerica.

On the other hand, there are some interesting consequences to France and England as a result of this. It is not that Alexius causes Arthur of Brittany to become King Arthur of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, but the events that lead to that are a side effect of the events that Alexius does influence.

But whether or not he steps on a bug doesn't really matter either, because its just a bug and the odds of any individual bug influencing anything are minimal.

Sometimes, a horseshoe nail is just a nail. The horseshoe is not lost, the horse is not lost, the message gets through on time anyway, the battle is won, the kingdom is saved.

And some changes are more likely to be like that than others.

I don't know enough about genetics to know if the Habsburg lip would be one of them. But certainly if Mary of Burgundy does not marry who she did, that matters.

 

[ZachScape]

You have to look at it as a chain of events (and) on a molecular level. Every little thing will create a drastically different TL, depending on how far back you go.

Lets say Julius Caesar does step on an ant and squishes it to death. That ant would have been part of the natural food chain in Europe. An insectivorous bird would have eaten that ant, but instead gets a different ant. That ant could have been different in size, wieght, and genetic make up. The bird is now not only different on a minute molecular level, but may be in a different location, having just looked for that ant. So instead of the bird getting eaten by an owl IOTL, it get eaten by a fox ITTL. The fox now is in a different place than IOTL. That means it would have had to walk differently. Not to get vulgar, but its "genetic material" would have been swinging from side to side differently. Now we can go to either one of two ways.

1. The fox gets hunted by a fur-trapper, and the fur trapper eats the fox. This would be a massive-massive change, as the bird would have altered the fox's physical makeup on a molecular base. The fur trapper would have not had different nutrients and thus would have different children later on.
2. The fox goes on to live, but has different offspring than IOTL. See 1.

So when you go by an ant, look at the food chain, then look at nutriants, then look at offspring.

-----

I can keep going, but I'd rather read what you think about this first.

 

[Snake Featherston]

As I see it, butterfly effects would have relatively limited narrow effects, but in the long term a lost horseshoe nail can be the cause of the fall of one empire and the rise of another. It is not realistic to have Suddhodana Gautama not step on a bug and so in the 1st Century AD the world is ruled by super-advanced Hindu kingdoms. For that matter, as states and societies become more complex small butterflies take far longer to have effect and may have more indirect than direct effects.

If Adolf Hitler is killed in the World War I trenches, it's very likely that a Jew-hating indigenous German fascism would show up led by a German. Perhaps even Ernst Rohm, who builds a much more revolutionary fascism and makes German Nazism have even more similarities with Stalinism. It is extremely unlikely that the death of one Austrian illegal immigrant serving with Bavarian formations means no fascism in Germany at all.

Similarly, if smallpox kills Ioseb Jugashvili as a young boy, there is still a great probability of an Old Bolshevik who understands bureaucracy killing all the rest of them happening, no less so than IOTL. Said Old Bolshevik, however, may be a native Russian and this be the cause for the minorities of the USSR being screwed worse than IOTL.

In the 19th Century, small changes can have expontentially greater effects, as societies depended on smaller ruling classes and more narrowly defined ideologies. So if for instance Ben Butler becomes Vice President instead of the general in command of the Army of the James, it is possible to end the US Civil War in 1864 with a hammer and anvil battle to crush the Army of Northern Virginia and the surrenders of the rest of the CS armies following. It is also possible even moreso in the 18th Century for the Tsarina Elizabeth to live a few more years and England loses the Seven Years' War in Europe, meaning that it also loses the one in North America. Greater triumphs of Russian arms throw thus the entire ARW sequence into abeyance. Without, I might note, a single direct effect of this in North America itself.

Any changes in the Early Modern period will have tremendous butterflies, but the societies that show up will be vaguely recognizable, especially if post-Westphalia. Medieval and before and you would have to do a lot of research to do a timeline with that long a POD continuing into 2011.

 

[ZachScape]

It doesn't matter who you kill. It could be a Pope or a farmer. That one farmer could have changed a whole lot. With ever interaction he every had with somebody making them act a bit different. It leads to everyone the farmer interacts with having different children, and everyone they interact with having different children.

 

[SavoyTruffle]

As a rule I think that the butterfly effect grows more significant as the time factor increases. So a 1914 POD won't change the alliances of WWI, but a POD in 1300 practically butterflies WWI away.

 

[Grey Wolf]

I think small changes generally even out and make no difference overall - all this stepping on a bug stuff. Unless the person dies from doing so, then who cares?

Wars kill millions of men, and sure if SOME of these had lived it could have made a tremendous difference, but that is for SOME of them. Most of the others would have led lives similar to most of those who did survive and be generally irrelevant to history.

I see it in a kind of pattern of waves, and think that idea needs explaining better when I have more time

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

 

[Alex Richards]

The way I see it, a butterfly also relies on the speed of knowledge at the time. I view it as follows:

1. It is (to take an example) 1200. The fastest a journey can be made between London and York is 3 days. Therefore if an event happens differently in London which has no visible external evidence (so not for example a fire which can be seen from some distance away), the earliest a butterfly can occur in York is 3 days later, because there is no reason for anyone to change their minds as they haven't learnt of the change in event.

2. Your PoD takes place in 7th Century Europe, at a time when there is absolutely no contact between Mesoamerica and Europe. Until your timeline reaches a point where America is contacted, or the OTL date of contact (whichever is sooner), then it can be argued that the New world can be essentially isolated from the effects of the PoD and will progress as OTL. If you want a different Mesoamerica, then it simply requires a second PoD specific to America (though given our knowledge of the period this could be as vague as 'the Zapotecs rise to dominance instead of the Aztecs' as long as it isn't too crucial to the story).

Note this is based on a more literary reading of the idea of the Butterfly effect, rather than a strict Quantum-Chaos reading.

 

[Thespitron 6000]

If we regard time as a wave, then at certain points small influences act as resonance, increasing or decreasing the amplitude of the wave and pushing the timeline into a new direction. At other points, small influences have no effect whatsoever, and are "washed out" of the wave, with the result that the wave continues on as before. Identifying the points at which we can alter the amplitude of the wave is the job of the alt-hister.

As an example, yesterday I had two pieces of bacon with breakfast. Does it matter which order I ate them? No, of course not. It doesn't affect my day in the slightest. But then on the way back home from the local bar, I was nearly hit by another car when they suddenly decided to make a left turn. Would that affect my day? Definitely. And it might affect all of your days, because some of you wouldn't have your TLs commented on, or wouldn't draw inspiration from TLs I might post.

Two different events, both small, yet one has a larger impact than the other. Because they're at different points on the wave.

And this has been Thespitron's pseudo-philosophical lecture on spacetime metaphysics for the day.

 

[wolf_brother]

Are we all forgetting about butterfly nets? Changes can't take place or spread unless there is a direct connection between the POD and the butterfly in question. There has to be a chain of events that take place for any changes from IOTL to occur. In regards to ants and etc; they don't matter. Now, with that being said, even the smallest possible difference can make a large change, but only if that change would directly lead to another butterfly, and another, and so on. Changes in Europe don't affect Mesoamerica before contact, because there's no way to directly move the butterflies from one continent to another; but changing the Hapsburg royal line does have serious and major implications and butterfly effects on the timeline because the butterflies, but only after the butterflies are set loose with the offspring of the changed royal line.

 

[DrakeRlugia]

The way I see it, a butterfly also relies on the speed of knowledge at the time. I view it as follows:

1. It is (to take an example) 1200. The fastest a journey can be made between London and York is 3 days. Therefore if an event happens differently in London which has no visible external evidence (so not for example a fire which can be seen from some distance away), the earliest a butterfly can occur in York is 3 days later, because there is no reason for anyone to change their minds as they haven't learnt of the change in event.

2. Your PoD takes place in 7th Century Europe, at a time when there is absolutely no contact between Mesoamerica and Europe. Until your timeline reaches a point where America is contacted, or the OTL date of contact (whichever is sooner), then it can be argued that the New world can be essentially isolated from the effects of the PoD and will progress as OTL. If you want a different Mesoamerica, then it simply requires a second PoD specific to America (though given our knowledge of the period this could be as vague as 'the Zapotecs rise to dominance instead of the Aztecs' as long as it isn't too crucial to the story).

Note this is based on a more literary reading of the idea of the Butterfly effect, rather than a strict Quantum-Chaos reading.

This is essentially have I view the butterfly effect. As a wave of sorts that spreads out. The survival of Miguel da Paz in The Prince of Peace has immediate effects in Iberia that slowly spread out into Europe and into the world.

 

[Elfwine]

Some interesting thoughts here. The thing I don't get is the Minute Differences Somehow Matter Enough to Measure.

The difference between two ants is extremely unlikely to be high enough to produce any noticeable distinction for the bird, let alone for its offspring or predators.

Maybe it does get eaten by a fox.

So? Does that mean that the TL #1 fox went hungry? That it ate something poisonous?

That a farmer stepping on a bug is going to actually say something different, do something different, think any differently?

So I'd like something that doesn't involve referring subatomic particles to explain just how anyone would be able to tell that a bug was stepped on (or wasn't).

Now if that farmer dies...well, you could kiss Basil the Macedonian goodbye with something like that. Or you could kiss goodbye someone who had no influence and no impact except on his immediate family and neighbors, which would be interesting in the sense Snake's ancestors are killed off (Sorry Snake), but it wouldn't mean no AH.com or WWII.

 

[The Professor]

I think small changes generally even out and make no difference overall - all this stepping on a bug stuff. Unless the person dies from doing so, then who cares?

Wars kill millions of men, and sure if SOME of these had lived it could have made a tremendous difference, but that is for SOME of them. Most of the others would have led lives similar to most of those who did survive and be generally irrelevant to history.

I see it in a kind of pattern of waves, and think that idea needs explaining better when I have more time

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

This tends to be my view as well.
It's a ripple effect - some changes increase an event's probability, some reduce it, but it is the cumulative effect that we notice and remark on as significant.

That said too many TLs are written as changing the "climate" rather than the "weather". Yes a person's odds of being born are altered if the night of conception goes a bit different but aren't we supposed to be looking at a TL close to our own and not just different to it.

Basically we shouldn't change an event that occurred OTL unless there is an overwhelming reason to. I don't feel that "random chance" should be that reason.

 

[Elfwine]

This tends to be my view as well.
It's a ripple effect - some changes increase an event's probability, some reduce it, but it is the cumulative effect that we notice and remark on as significant.

That said too many TLs are written as changing the "climate" rather than the "weather". Yes a person's odds of being born are altered if the night of conception goes a bit different but aren't we supposed to be looking at a TL close to our own and not just different to it.

Basically we shouldn't change an event that occurred OTL unless there is an overwhelming reason to. I don't feel that "random chance" should be that reason.

What would be overwhelming?

 

[Zuvarq]

Are we all forgetting about butterfly nets? Changes can't take place or spread unless there is a direct connection between the POD and the butterfly in question. There has to be a chain of events that take place for any changes from IOTL to occur. In regards to ants and etc; they don't matter. Now, with that being said, even the smallest possible difference can make a large change, but only if that change would directly lead to another butterfly, and another, and so on. Changes in Europe don't affect Mesoamerica before contact, because there's no way to directly move the butterflies from one continent to another; but changing the Hapsburg royal line does have serious and major implications and butterfly effects on the timeline because the butterflies, but only after the butterflies are set loose with the offspring of the changed royal line.

Yes they can. Butterfly nets are because of laziness or the admiration for something that happened in OTL that you still want to happen. Technically changes should start happening everywhere, even places that aren't effected, within 50 years or so.

I'm not going to argue any further though, I've argued about this same subject so many times.

 

[Elfwine]

Yes they can. Butterfly nets are because of laziness or the admiration for something that happened in OTL that you still want to happen. Technically changes should start happening everywhere, even places that aren't effected, within 50 years or so.

I'm not going to argue any further though, I've argued about this same subject so many times.

I presume this is the chaos theory and Brownian motion thing we discussed via PM the other day.

EDIT: All I'm gonna say is, it's a matter of personal choice how you want to use the butterfly effect and to what extent in your TLs. However don't criticize someone for using it differently, unless they have a POD in 1700 that still leads to Hitler rising to power and starting WW2.

This is explaining the purpose of this thread, not attempting to rehash our argument.

The main thing that strikes me, and is the reason for the thread, is "how much do minor things even matter?"

I point to The Professor's post. If a bunch of particles all fall the same way as OTL, and their fall a certain way caused a certain sperm to be the right one, and a certain egg...then sperm+egg=same results.

 

[Zuvarq]

I presume this is the chaos theory and Brownian motion thing we discussed via PM the other day.

Yeah.

But, all I'm gonna say is, it's a matter of personal choice how you want to use the butterfly effect and to what extent in your TLs. However don't criticize someone for using it differently, unless they have a POD in 1700 that still leads to Hitler rising to power and starting WW2.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Speaking of that:

Some interesting thoughts here. The thing I don't get is the Minute Differences Somehow Matter Enough to Measure.

The difference between two ants is extremely unlikely to be high enough to produce any noticeable distinction for the bird, let alone for its offspring or predators.

Maybe it does get eaten by a fox.

So? Does that mean that the TL #1 fox went hungry? That it ate something poisonous?

That a farmer stepping on a bug is going to actually say something different, do something different, think any differently?

So I'd like something that doesn't involve referring subatomic particles to explain just how anyone would be able to tell that a bug was stepped on (or wasn't).

Now if that farmer dies...well, you could kiss Basil the Macedonian goodbye with something like that. Or you could kiss goodbye someone who had no influence and no impact except on his immediate family and neighbors, which would be interesting in the sense Snake's ancestors are killed off (Sorry Snake), but it wouldn't mean no AH.com or WWII.

Thanks to genealogy, there actually were people from both sides of my family who I know were fighting together 1,000 years ago in the First Crusade. The ancestors of one side could die from being in the wrong place at the wrong time in a victorious battle, and that would be a butterfly net that has no real impact in anything except to remove one person, as their death would not have altered the outcome of that Crusade.

 

[Elfwine]

Thanks to genealogy, there actually were people from both sides of my family who I know were fighting together 1,000 years ago in the First Crusade. The ancestors of one side could die from being in the wrong place at the wrong time in a victorious battle, and that would be a butterfly net that has no real impact in anything except to remove one person, as their death would not have altered the outcome of that Crusade.

A World Without Snake.

 

[wolf_brother]

Yes they can. Butterfly nets are because of laziness or the admiration for something that happened in OTL that you still want to happen. Technically changes should start happening everywhere, even places that aren't effected, within 50 years or so.

I'm not going to argue any further though, I've argued about this same subject so many times.

So changes should spontaneously exist after the POD?

History happened the way it did for a reason, and unless you have an overwhelming reason for a change directly connected to the POD(s) or other butterflies then it will still happen the same way. Unless you view alt. hist. as a video game random number generator; 'I rolled a 7! That means the Mayans don't collapse, though my POD is an Umayyad victory in the Battle of Tours.' I'm not quite sure how you could present alternate history without butterfly nets... otherwise it seems like it would be 'merely' historical fiction, which is a different genre altogether.

 

[Zuvarq]

So changes should spontaneously exist after the POD?

Butterfly nets are, IMHO, the only logical way to present alternate history. History happened the way it did for a reason, and unless you have an overwhelming reason for a change directly connected to the POD(s) or other butterflies then it will still happen the same way. Unless you view alt. hist. as a video game random number generator; 'I rolled a 7! That means the Mayans don't collapse, though my POD is an Umayyad victory in the Battle of Tours.'

Brownian motion + the butterfly effect.

EDIT: Also a victory at Tours might prevent Vinland, which could change some stuff in the Americas even if you do a butterfly net.