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

My somewhat belated responses...

I've basically ignored repetitive posts after page 3 sorry!
What would be overwhelming?
Genital injury, a doss of STDs, exposure to radiation, waking up the relatives who then "interupt" etc etc

There's also the possibility of butterfly nets that produce similar, yet different effects. In Up With the Star Adolf Hitler is still leader of a fascist party in a Germany, but in Imperial Germany the power of the Junkers and the Kaiser limits his potential power, and he never has the chance to rise to full power, with the political hierarchy using him solely to limit the potential of military takeover.

The ATL Hitler also hates Slavs more than Jews due to serving under a Jewish officer in a war against German-speaking Austria, which he identifies with Slavdom due to pre-existing butterflies. Still an unpleasant warlike fellow in charge of a major political party, but not one remotely likely to assume all power in Kaiser Wilhelm III's Germany.

Interesting. Tho your use of "butterfly nets" does imply that similar events to OTL are less realistic.

Yes, it is.

Of course it's reasonable to put a butterfly net against areas that wouldn't be directly affected by the POD, even though they should change anyway.

The thing I'm trying to say is that it's also reasonable to still change it.

Reasonable to change yes but also reasonable not to change.
Events aren't a series of unconnected dice rolls - they all interact.
Some increase the probability of an event, some reduce it.
I don't believe in arbitrarily changing an event completely just because it could have gone differently to OTL.

This is where I get confused.

Let's say Hannibal sacks Rome.

The particles impacted by Brownian motion are impacted by it in exactly the same way (randomly) in OTL. There's just as much a chance of rolling a 3 as OTL.

Obviously the dice could go differently, but your argument is going beyond "could" into "should", which is why I'm trying to track the butterfly that is is having an impact on the dice.

Its just as mathematically probable that you will get a 3 as a 4, after all.

Picking dice because getting into one in millions doesn't really explain the point any better than 1 in 6.

I think a point often overlooked is, if Alternate History means there are Many Worlds, then it follows that in some of them, many histories that are substantially different at some point in the past can nevertheless converge on the same situation, or if you like a set of parallel situations practically indistinguishable from each other, at some time in their parallel futures. This has nothing to do with resonances or fate; it has to to with a given situation being possible in one timeline implying it is possible in another, therefore, given the infinite fanning out of alternate possibilities from each moment in any one timeline, there can be an intersection of essentially the same set of circumstances as derives from one of the many worlds fanning out of a very different timeline. In one world the dice fell one way and moved things toward where a different world was tending; in another it went another way--which took it to the same place from a different direction.

When we argue about whether stepping on a bug must lead to a cascade of accumulating changes resulting, some time period later, in a remarkably different world from one where that bug was not stepped on yet, what we are arguing about really is the nature of the ever-broadening fan of events radiating from those two neighboring moments. To say "it doesn't make much difference" is to say that the family of timelines emananting from "bug killed" alternative is pretty much indistinguishable and strongly overlapping "bug escapes" timelines; to say the opposite is to say the two families of outcomes are distinct and getting more distinct all the time.

Clearly there is room here for arguing both are right--it depends on which timelines you choose to trace from the event. My sense is, in this case the two sets stay pretty well intertwined, which is my way of agreeing with those who say it doesn't matter much. Still, from any event no matter how trivial there will emanate alternatives not at all like those found in the family of events emanating from the alternative resolution of the event. Vice versa, even very gross divergences might, in two subsets of the timelines diverging from each side of the traumatic change, nevertheless converge.

To say that two very different timelines converge on essentially the same situation is not very interesting. But this is my argument for what I've called the "anti-butterflies;" you can have two parallel histories where something large and noticeable--say, the complete absence of an island or even continent--indicates they diverged a very very long time ago, and yet have elements that run in parallel.

This is my answer to those who pooh-pooh geographic or even solar-system PODs on the grounds that any POD whatsoever that's more than some timeframe they deem appropriate--a generation, a century, sometimes they grudgingly allow a thousand years but no more than that!--must necessarily result in an unrecognizable world, therefore none of this talk of what would Julius Caesar do if there were no Antarctica or some such--supposedly we're not allowed to have hominids, or mammals, or chordates, or multicellular life if the Butterfly Cultist is in a grumpy mood, because Things Were Different millions of years ago. They'd say the same thing if Antarctica were right there but had some different arrangement of mountain ranges 50 million years ago. Or for that matter, if Frank Sinatra put the songs on his third album out in a different order, that would presumably affect the dating patterns of our parents (or grandparents, these days) and cause "different sperm to hit different eggs" and so by the 1980s or so the world starts to be different just from that cause alone--because this dance went on a bit longer or that car ride got cut short a bit sooner, totally different people walk the Earth today and did everything different!

I say, yeah, if you went back in a time machine and caused the divergence I suggested when I had it happen, and there was only one time line, then the odds are if you took the time machine back to your time of origin, every darn thing would be different, by sheer chaos, before you even begin to reckon the systematic changes. But since we are talking AH, there is some set of timelines radiating from that POD where the sheer random changes have been cancelled out, leaving two worlds as similar as they can be given some systematic divergence to compare. And that's the timeline we choose to look at, because we want to focus on what systematic difference this or that change made.

The question of whether crushing a bug, or swapping Sinatra songs around, or preventing the formation of Antarctica 500 million years ago, makes a "big" or "little" difference today is one of taking a poll of all the timelines radiating from both sides of whatever divergence we are talking about and seeing if they differ significantly as a pair of statistical outcomes; lacking a cross-time instrument for taking these measurements objectively, I say you can have it either way you like, as long as you can make a plausible case for how much or little the systematic difference between the world must close off possible identities.

Yes exactly.
 
To repeat:

Yes a POD will mean a TL diverges rapidly from OTL.
But not all its effects will be noticeable or even distinguishable wrt OTL.
Looking at 2 crowd scenes where a few faces are different the differences are not immediately obvious until we take a closer look.
How different 2 TLs can appear depends where we are looking and how close, how detailed, an inspection we take.

Let us not forget that this universe also has dampening mechanisms in its systems - it can't remain (relatively) stable otherwise.
Biology especially has cell machinery designed to mitigate or even ignore changes to DNA.


As said before events aren't a series of unconnected dice rolls.

Some increase the probability of an event, some reduce it.
These all interact to affect the probability of other events.

I don't believe in arbitrarily and randomly changing an event completely just because it could have gone differently to OTL.

But in the end how much we stress the importance of altered events and their alteration in TLs is a personal choice -author's fiat if you will.
And if the alteration is believable (tho everyone's "belief threshold" is different) then it doesn't really matter how much scientifically we try to justify it.
 
Interesting. Tho your use of "butterfly nets" does imply that similar events to OTL are less realistic.

I might note that Hitler being involved in politics *seems* to be a butterfly net until what Hitler actually thinks and his greater limitations in the Imperial German system are factored in. Hitler's different experiences in WWII mean he's an ordinary Jew-hater for his time. As a Slavophobe, however, he's that same complete monster who will never have actual power ITTL in Imperial Germany.
 
Top