Things that Can't Be Butterflied

I have considered starting a TL where a small inconsequential event happening far enough back echos around the world making it unrecognizable to someone from OTL. The truth is there is nothing that cant be butterflied. The ultimate butterfly, something changes in the instant of the big bang before time even starts, the universe progresses differently. Nothing is how we know it, period.
 
I have considered starting a TL where a small inconsequential event happening far enough back echos around the world making it unrecognizable to someone from OTL. The truth is there is nothing that cant be butterflied. The ultimate butterfly, something changes in the instant of the big bang before time even starts, the universe progresses differently. Nothing is how we know it, period.

Certainly, there is nothing that cannot be butterflied. However, if you have a certain POD, not everything can be butterflied. Like I said, events like Carthage wins the Second Punic War, or Umayyad victory at Tours certainly won't butterfly the Tunguska Event or the eruption of the Tambora 1815 out of existence.
 
Certainly, there is nothing that cannot be butterflied. However, if you have a certain POD, not everything can be butterflied. Like I said, events like Carthage wins the Second Punic War, or Umayyad victory at Tours certainly won't butterfly the Tunguska Event or the eruption of the Tambora 1815 out of existence.

You can still have an event that can't be affected by humans happen differently or not at all based on the fact that the universe is chaotic. If Napoleon died as a child, you don't have to have Tambora erupt in 1815 to the same degree.
 
You can still have an event that can't be affected by humans happen differently or not at all based on the fact that the universe is chaotic. If Napoleon died as a child, you don't have to have Tambora erupt in 1815 to the same degree.

Well, admittedly, this boils all down to the question of how weak/strong you consider the butterfly effect to be. :eek:
 
You can still have an event that can't be affected by humans happen differently or not at all based on the fact that the universe is chaotic. If Napoleon died as a child, you don't have to have Tambora erupt in 1815 to the same degree.

i fail to see how you put those two together. napoleon has nothing to do with the chain of events that lead to the volcanic eruption
 
i fail to see how you put those two together. napoleon has nothing to do with the chain of events that lead to the volcanic eruption
More to the point, if you 'rerolled the dice' the volcano would erupt every time, as the eruption is pretty much deterministic.

Napoleon has nothing to do with some peasant in China - but rerolling the dice will give different sperm hitting different eggs. (Fertilization being pretty random and chaotic).
 
ATL1: Tunguska 1910
ATL2 Tunguska 1907
ATL4 London 1907

I'm rather skeptical that the Tunguska object would be likely to hit Earth at any particular time other than 1908. Given that its orbital period probably wasn't rationally related to that of Earth, its presence in pretty much the same place exactly two years later seems an astounding coincidence.

i fail to see how you put those two together. napoleon has nothing to do with the chain of events that lead to the volcanic eruption

Well, Napoleon did have something to do with Revolutionary France, which had something to do with the weather, which had something to do with the presence or absence of water on top of the Earth's crust, which had something to do with the force on various parts of the Earth's crust, which had something to do with the eruption. Intuitively, I doubt forty years of butterflies could delay the eruption six months, but (tonight, at least) I have little problem with four thousand years' worth doing the same.
 
I'm rather skeptical that the Tunguska object would be likely to hit Earth at any particular time other than 1908. Given that its orbital period probably wasn't rationally related to that of Earth, its presence in pretty much the same place exactly two years later seems an astounding coincidence.

Well it could hit later or earlier depending on its orbital period and other extraterrestrial factors.

Tambora could erupt later or earlier, for longer or shorter, based on non-human factors.
 
More to the point, if you 'rerolled the dice' the volcano would erupt every time, as the eruption is pretty much deterministic.

Napoleon has nothing to do with some peasant in China - but rerolling the dice will give different sperm hitting different eggs. (Fertilization being pretty random and chaotic).
Indeed; the entire point of the butterfly effect is that you can't draw a strict line of determinable causation for all the effects that a single event could have in a chaotic system (and the universe is, all things considered, a very chaotic system).

I'm rather skeptical that the Tunguska object would be likely to hit Earth at any particular time other than 1908. Given that its orbital period probably wasn't rationally related to that of Earth, its presence in pretty much the same place exactly two years later seems an astounding coincidence.
I would have to agree that when it comes to anything with a fixed orbital period the time scale is not that flexible. However, when it comes to something like the Tunguska event, there's still some degree of flexibility. On a cosmic scale the a tiny puff of solar wind could be the difference between the event happening in the middle of Siberia or over any major city in Europe, or simply not happening at all because the meteor/comet missed Earth entirely.
 

Sachyriel

Banned
If you want the Author to account for every piece of dust in the sky you're gonna have to be sad cause no one wants to read that version of the story.
 

Susano

Banned
If you want the Author to account for every piece of dust in the sky you're gonna have to be sad cause no one wants to read that version of the story.

But thats where the Butterfly Effect actually kicks in TL writing and even helps. We dont have to follow every deterministic line - we can justifiedly say "Butterfly Effect" and substitute its randomness with author arbitrariness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

By the principle of quantum entanglement as Wiki said it, a property of certain quantum system is inextricably linked, changing or performing measurements to one will immediately alters the property of another. It is safe I think to deduce that quantum butterflies could travel faster than light due to this property. Of course I'm not a physicist, so if I'm wrong or misinterpret the concept please do correct me.

The important issue is that causality may not be violated. Indeed, preventing exchange of information between various relativistic time frames is what this lightspeed barrier is all about, so AFAIK quantum entanglement cant "beat" it. Zyzzyva explained it once nicely, but, god, thats maybe nearly two years ago already... But then who knows, the thing about quantum mechanics is that they are not yet in harmony with macrophysics.
 
More to the point, if you 'rerolled the dice' the volcano would erupt every time, as the eruption is pretty much deterministic.

Napoleon has nothing to do with some peasant in China - but rerolling the dice will give different sperm hitting different eggs. (Fertilization being pretty random and chaotic).

Ah, you're the one who says that, then.

Or is this sperm/egg example just a commonplace here?

Obviously this is true in any one time-line. Once you introduce even a tiny change, chaotic effects cascade.

However--by the very nature of speculating in Alternate History, we are accepting, for the purpose of discussion, alternate timelines. Once we do that, there is no reason to exclude the uncountable number of alternate timelines arising in every instant, one for every possible alternate quantum outcome. Obviously then there isn't just one timeline emerging from any POD you care to name--there are within some tiny fraction of a second of the POD, uncountable trillions multiplying to quadrillions and so on. They form a widening sheaf, a set within the larger set of all possible timelines.

And so, within that set, chaotic events than can go any number of ways can nevertheless replicate events that also did happen in any other timeline you care to name--say, ours for instance.

Thus, in a world where for example the island of Greenland did not exist--that's a POD going back many tens or hundreds of millions of years (depending on whether you want to say the rock that forms Greenland today never formed at all, or whether it just got shuffled elsewhere during continental drift)--we could nevertheless outline human history happening very much as it did OTL, up until human history as we know it OTL started to specifically interact with Greenland itself.

Of course global weather patterns depend on both ocean currents and interactions with landforms. Greenland holds a fair amount of ice; if we don't shift that ice onto other lands--which broadens the divergence of course--we have to say that water just never existed, or we have different shorelines all over the world. (Actually if the rocks that form Greenland OTL never formed, there is probably more water on this particular set of alternate Earths with our sea level and other landforms the same--because the landmass of Greenland displaces a lot of water, I am guessing more volume than the ice on top of it). Assuming sea levels as OTL and that we achieve them by saying there has been a different amount of water all along, we come to what I think should be the criterion for whether something is "ASB" or not--how physically plausible is it to get similar results some distance away?

If there are possible configurations of ocean currents and prevailing winds that would leave the Bering Strait and northern Eurasia and western North America much as OTL without this particular big island there, then fine. There would be a fair number of alternate Earths which would not have Greenland, and a good fraction of them would have very similar climates some distance away from Greenland, and within that sheaf of worlds, there would be a fraction--tiny compared to the whole subset, but still comprising a huge number of possible alternate Earths--where our species evolved as it did, colonized the planet (except for Greenland! and its immediate neighborhood would be inevitably different) and even the details of who begets whom, which genes are in which sperms which impact which eggs, can be as close to OTL (some distance from Greenland) as we like. The Inuit are different, but we can just limit that difference to absence of the particular ones who OTL did settle Greenland.

Or perhaps someone can show that, without some large island of much the same area in much the same places throughout geological history, the large-scale climate would necessarily be different, either now or at some time in the past, and if that is true then there would be no physical way to get a world similar to ours even far from Greenland. In that case, I'd call it ASB proper.

But if the overall evolution of global climate did not require Greenland strictly, then never mind that back in the Mesozoic, whole linages of animals and plants did not find the precursor landmass of Greenland where it was OTL. The point is, equivalent ones could have arisen elsewhere, probably nearby, and their descendants evolved to converge on the range of species that exist today OTL. Not, I stress, because there is some destiny that demands our current ensemble, but because we happen to choose to look at the worlds that did produce similar ones. Meanwhile there are lots of other timelines with completely different species by our timeframe--just as there are lots of other Earths with exactly the same geography as ours, but completely different species--because our timeline is not particularly privileged, except in the sense that we choose to privilege it from our parochial point of view.

Because after all the cascading divergences from any arbitrary difference you care to name are true of OTL too--our timeline is one of a practically infinite number of possible outcomes of events pretty much indistinguishable from OTL at any point in the past; if you go back to the Tambora eruption and do nothing but take notes, hidden by some Star Trek duckblind and scrupulously avoiding all contact with everyone and scrubbing out every interaction with the environment that might have the slightest consequence, but stay with any one particular timeline, different sperm hit different eggs, it rains on different days--everything is different. However, the world you are in is no more--and no less-probable than our own.

When, to achieve a particular state of affairs, you need to imagine a whole series of events that are all not reasonably likely as individual events, then you are venturing into strictly ASB territory. What that means in terms of the huge and proliferating sheaves of possible timelines is that you are selectively looking for the relatively rare timelines that contain a sequence of highly improbable events; it's a small target to hit. It is also easy to imagine scenarios which are simply physically impossible.

And I started to go with a fun example, but this is long enough already. I just want to stress, that it seems to me there is a Church of the One True Butterfly around here that only considers half of the implications of Lorenzian chaos, and letting the other shoe drop gives us what I call "anti-butterflies." We can consider timelines that derive from very early PODs and yet still have features recognizably close to our own, if they could plausibly arise in the changed situation.
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As for the main topic of this thread--I'd use the same criteria I'd use in judging whether a particular ATL was "ASB" or not to judge how likely a given POD among humans would be to affect say the timing of the Tambora eruption or the like. However--if I want a world where Napoleon was never born and Tambora erupts in 1821, I wouldn't be restricted to cause-and-effect results of Napoleon's non-birth, and in this case, with only decades for absurdly tiny variations to affect deep molten rock I'd opt for another divergence--that meanwhile, while Napoleon was not getting born, the mantle rock flowed a little differently. How far back that POD would have to be would depend on knowing a lot more than I do about geology. But however far back it has to go, we can still have France and Corsica as OTL in say 1750, even though the rock is flowing differently underground.

So for people who are considering highly implausible physical mechanisms that are unlikely to work to get meteors and comets to hit the Earth at different times, it all depends on whether it is important to you that there be a cause-and-effect relationship between some change among humans and some large physical event, or whether you were just trying to use butterfly chaos to your advantage to enable something to happen. If the latter, I invite you to consider anti-butterflies instead--Earth evolving to much as OTL up to a certain point, in a solar system that is already different. You can have this if you want it.
 
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