The Butterfly Effect

Think of it this way - if you believe that a minor PoD such as me not making this post would lead to me being in the exact same position physically and mentally for the rest of my life, then you don't believe in free will. Which is perfectly valid philosophically, though I don't believe sound.

Its the impact the POD has which is important. Free will as has been said doesn't come into it. If as offered I were to wear one pair of socks over another, would it have any impact upon my day? In all likelyhood the answer is no. I would have had to have moved my hand slightly to the left in the morning to pick them up when getting dressed, but otherwise my socks had no impact at all upon yesterday or indeed most days.

Currently I am sat in the office, all the work that can be done this week is complete and as such I am just idling an hour or so away. Has replying to this post made a difference over say browsing the bbc website again? Certainly, but has it had lasting effect? Since I will in all likelyhood forget all about this post it seems fair to say its impact upon my life shall be minimal. It might perhaps effect the lives of others, but whether it would provoke a dramatic difference is surely highly questionable.

Its also questionable, since it seems to be being offered, whether sperm matter as much as is being implied.
 

Penelope

Banned
The only thing I really believe in the Butterfly Effect is that people born a few years after the POD are going to be different, but even that hangs on the POD itself.
 
There are two issues underlying the dispute over the butterfly effect. Firstly, how should one write alternate history and secondly, are there broad historical forces or is anything possible. As the first issue has been the main topic above I will look only at the second issue. It is clear that there are highly probable outcomes (for example, Japan had no obvious way of avoiding defeat after Pearl Harbor). The conflict is over whether carefully chosen small changes (for example Franz Ferdinand having a better driver) could cause history to diverge quickly to become completely unrecognisable or whether many things can be carried over. My feeling is there are some very big butterflies around but that they are hard to write.
 
Free will doesn't come into it.

There are only two alternatives:

1. Your action changes the world
2. Your action doesn't change the world



In relation to your posting or not posting:

(a) yes it's perfectly plausible that your post causes a snowball or cascade of changes, leading to a radically different world in 1 week or 1 year's time

but

(b) it's also perfectly plausible to generate an identical scenario (to one in which you didn't post) in 1 week or 1 year's time, because nobody remembers or cares by then, and the time that was spent posting and replying would otherwise have been wasted on posting and replying to other posts.


Now you might argue that there are 1 billion or 1 trillion or 1 googol ways (i.e. timelines) for (a) to happen, but only 1 or a few ways (i.e. timelines) for (b) to happen --- but even if we were all to accept that -- it doesn't mean that (b) couldn't happen -- and since we choose which timelines to discuss, we might choose to focus on (b) scenarios because we find them interesting.

Want an example, we all know (the exact numbers don't matter, but the principle does):

Let's say it's the American Revolution as the PoD. The loyalist lose. There are various alternate ways that could happen. In 99.9% of cases they go to Canada, return home, etc. that still leaves 0.1% of cases for them to go South Africa

Out of those cases (the 0.1% from previous paragraph), in 99.9% cases it leads to a pretty typical colony in South Africa, but in 0.1% leads to a Antipodean Prussia slave state called Drakia/Draka

Out of those cases (the 0.1% from previous paragraph), in 99.9% cases, the world is gradually more and more unrecognizable, but in 0.1% of cases, it leads to a world with Nazis, Soviets, etc., as well as Draka

Out of those cases (the 0.1% from previous paragraph), in 99.9% cases, the Draka are crushed, or the world is destroyed by nuclear war, but in 0.1% of cases the Draka have conquered the world by 2009.


Now go back. Let's say there's 1,000,000,000,000 possible timelines

Let's say it's the American Revolution as the PoD. The loyalist loose. There are various alternate ways that could happen. In 99.9% of cases they go to Canada, return home, etc. that still leaves 0.1% of cases for them to go South Africa --- so that gives 1,000,000,000 timelines with Loyalists in South Africa (and 999,000,000,000 without them)

Out of those cases (the 0.1% from previous paragraph), in 99.9% cases it leads to a pretty typical colony in South Africa, but in 0.1% leads to a Antipodean Prussia slave state called Drakia/Draka -- so that gives 1,000,000 timelines with the proto-Draka appearing (and 999,999,000,000 without them appearing or them not being proto-Draka)

Out of those cases (the 0.1% from previous paragraph), in 99.9% cases, the world is gradually more and more unrecognizable, but in 0.1% of cases, it leads to a world with Nazis, Soviets, etc., as well as Draka -- so that gives 1,000 timelines with Draka + Nazis + Soviets (and 999,999,999,000 without Draka + Nazis + Soviets)

Out of those cases (the 0.1% from previous paragraph), in 99.9% cases, the Draka are crushed, or the world is destroyed by nuclear war, but in 0.1% of cases the Draka have conquered the world by 2009. -- so that gives 1 timeline where the Draka conquers the world (and 999,999,999,999 where the Draka don't exist, or don't succeed if they do)


As far as I am concerned, it doesn't matter that there are vastly more possibilities without Draka or without Draka + Nazis + Soviets -- just because I'm interested, I see nothing wrong with discussing any of them - even if it's only one of the 1,000 or 1 timeline with Draka world conquest.

Remember also that all the timelines aee equally plausible and valid -- we are not considerably impossible timelines (what if magic became real and there were superheroes!) -- yes, non-Draka timelines may be more common, but any individual Draka or non-Draka timeline is just as likely as any other individual Draka or non-Draka timeline.
And even the Draka world conquest came down to small butterflies.

And sometimes one person can effect the course of history. I think it was in Alas, Babylon, the author talked about how sometimes the flow of history is undamned around one man.
 
I really like this one. Did you come up with it?

Here is one of my favorite examples of the butterfly effect.

It is the morning of March 30, 1981. Somebody intends to make a call to a number in New York City, and instead of entering area code "212," code "202" is entered, resulting in a wrong number in Washington DC. A person on the way to work had to pause to take the call and now leaves home 15 seconds later. That person stops at a red light that he otherwise would have passed when it was green. When the driver proceeds, he gets into a fender bender accident that would not have happened in OTL. A DC police officer must check the scene and write up a report. That officer is late to the station, and as a result, one of the officers assigned to guard President Reagan is different. When John Hinckley fires his gun at Reagan, his body guards are a fraction of a step out of sync and the outcome is different: either the shot misses him entirely, or it kills him.

An assassination changes history very quickly, but even a "miss" has an effect. After the unscathed president is pushed into the limousine, he smiles to reporters and makes a cowboy joke. The interruption in US government that happened in OTL no longer happens. Reactions from Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev and other leaders will have far less impact. Congressional democrats will give fewer sympathy votes to Reaganomics. And the butterflies continue.
 
I don't care if the butterfly in question is Mothra, it will not affect planetary weather patterns. Besides, according to quantum theory, everything that can happen (provided it doesn't violate natural laws) will happen, only in a parallel unvierse.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
Could tiny Butterflies cause major changes? Yes, sure why not? :)

But must a tiny Butterfly cause major changes? Absolutley not! ;)

IMO those who want to create totaly different ATLs with an absolutly miniscule PODs are quite entiteled to do so. :)

Just as entiteled as those who want to create ATLs quite convergent to OTL are. :)

And both scenarioes without needing to withstand namecallings :(

I agree, while the Butterfly effect is very well, the fanatic devotion by some poster is unsettling.

Beside that there's some historical forces which won't be change, no matter how many butterflies comes along. Britain, the Low Lands and Rhineland will become a economical powerhouse after the industrialisatian as example. The English, German and French literal tradition will end up rather major with any POD after the 12th century, the sheer amount of speakers ensure it, China will be a major power and Africa will be a backwater.

But on the other side I dislike the timelines which kill of Frederik I of Denmark in childhood and still have the same Christian IV as in OTL take part of the 30 Years War. But that's not butterflies it's a direct effect. There's no reason that with POD in 14th Century that a German named Martin Luther couldn't be born in 15th Century with the precisely same genes as OTL, and grow up to be a munk. It's unlikely but quite possible.
 
I agree, while the Butterfly effect is very well, the fanatic devotion by some poster is unsettling.

Beside that there's some historical forces which won't be change, no matter how many butterflies comes along. Britain, the Low Lands and Rhineland will become a economical powerhouse after the industrialisatian as example. The English, German and French literal tradition will end up rather major with any POD after the 12th century, the sheer amount of speakers ensure it, China will be a major power and Africa will be a backwater.
What? Why are all these inevitable? Especially the one about "Africa always = backwater"?
 
There seems to be two different things being discussed in this thread.

The first is the 'Random Number Generator' effect: if you rerun the random things in OTL, there's every chance they'll turn out differently. Personally I think this is bunk: if you're writing a timeline, it's not enough to say 'things turn out differently', you've got to specify a particular outcome, and if you're arguing against OTL on the grounds of low likelihood you'll find that every ATL has comparably low probability. In other words, you've got to arbitrarily pick one low-probability outcome from among many, and if the timeline writer wishes to choose an outcome similar to OTL that's their business: there's no logical reason to prejudice any alternate set of random results, because they're all equally unlikely.

However, the second effect - the proper Butterly Effect - renders the first somewhat redundant. Because there are effectively no truly random events. Everything is causally linked, but the chains of causation are subtle; by subtle, I mean they cannot be discerned by any non-omniscient being: the classic example being the butterfly itself, the fluttering of its wings having slight effects on the surrounding air currents, those effects additively affecting further currents, and the slightly different currents interacting with each other multiplicatively... until within a few months the whole global weather pattern is different from what it otherwise would have been, and there is a hurricane where previously there was none (and vice versa).

In other words, strictly speaking if *something* changes, it's natural that *everything* worldwide should change. There are no butterfly nets, because the weather itself is the original (and best) chaötic system and there's no stopping it.

However, when all's said and done, it's just a theory, and if a timeline author wishes to enforce parallelisms with OTL, that's entirely their business. That alone should not lead one to condemn a timeline: if it's well written and internally plausible (by OTL standards, that is to say fairly loose standards) then there's no reason to call out the lack of butterflies IMO.
 
I don't care if the butterfly in question is Mothra, it will not affect planetary weather patterns. Besides, according to quantum theory, everything that can happen (provided it doesn't violate natural laws) will happen, only in a parallel unvierse.
That's where the Butterfly Effect originated from in the first place, though-- some science-y guy discovered that if you changed the starting conditions in a weather model by even a tenth of a percent, weather patterns would quickly and radically change from the original model.

This can be applied to ATLs quite simply: Evil guys rah rah go on a rampage in Europe and the Near East, resulting in more immigrants heading to the United States in the late 19th century. Thus, by 1950, ATL-Detroit has a population of ~5,000,000 as opposed to OTL's ~2,000,000. This more densely-populated Detroit then must also has a greater urban heat island than OTL, thus changing the weather models the tenth-of-a-percent needed for the Butterfly Effect in its original form to kick in.
 
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