User Tools

Site Tools


alternate_history:butterfly_effect

The Butterfly Effect

A commonly encountered element in most timelines. It describes the secondary, minor effects of every Divergence that add up over time. While every Divergence has very direct consequences that can be detailed and explained in the timeline itself, it of course also, realistically, changes the lives of thousands or millions of people in the timeline in ways too small to describe in detail. However, those effects have effects themselves, etc. etc., which leads to a change in the timeline's world not covered by the direct timeline itself. As those changes cannot be explained in detail, they are summarised as “Butterfly Effect”, to which (from the author's and reader's point of view) random elements in the timeline are attributed.

One important factor in that is that as soon as the Butterfly effect takes hold (varying on approach, see below), people now born will not be the same person as OTL (though they may have the same name), because even if the parents should still meet, the chance of the same sperm meeting the same egg is infinitesimal. This is also one of the points of controversy between the approaches, again see below.

The name derives from a famous example used in chaos theory: The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Europe can later cause a devastating storm in China - as it will create a tiny wind current, which will go on to upset larger and larger wind movements all over the world. Six months later, the timeline where the butterfly flapped its wings has stormy weather, while the one where it didn't is sunny. Of course, the flap may also prevent a storm that otherwise would have happened…

The foundation of chaos theory was found by Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963 when, rather than starting a weather simulation at the beginning, he started it midway through using the numbers on a printout which were rounded to three figures after the decimal point. That small difference was enough to produce totally different results by the time the new program had reached the point where the old one ended.

Fiction has had similar ideas even earlier, though: Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder" predicted something like this as early as 1952, BTW. "Die dreifache Warnung" (1911) by Arthur Schnitzler was even quicker, though, as Max Sinister discovered. Interestingly, both stories use butterflies.


The Three Approaches

While there is a broad consensus on the forum that the butterfly effect must be taken into account to cover all the secondary effects, there is some controvery about the application of it. The most 'fundamentalist' approach says that absolutely anything that happens after the PoD has the potential to go differently to OTL.

The other, more moderate approach to the butterfly effect is to assume that the Butterfly Effect spreads outwards from the origin of the Divergence, reaching more far away lands only after some time, time the secondary effects need to build up and reach those lands. Even then, the moderate approach will tell you the butterfly effect only affects the “context system” of the Divergence's region. For example, if the PoD happens in medieval Peru, then it may take some decades for the butterfly effect to manifest in Mesoamerica, and even centuries for it to reach outlying regions, while European history will not be affected until 1492.

The third approach, to disregard the Butterfly Effect more or less exactly, or to have it affect or not affect the world at the author's arbitrary will, is as said pretty much discredited on the Forum, though very popular in professional literature.


Reasons for employing a particular approach

Reasons for such a liberal, or at least a moderate approach can be found in literature and writing stories: Henry VIII on an airship is more exciting than English King You've Never Heard Of on an airship. Alternate History in stories works much better if the reader can spot familiar themes - people, nations or events. That is also why the liberal approach is so well liked in popular literature. And of course it is easier to write a timeline if you do not have to worry how history goes in those parts you do not focus on, as you can simply assumes it goes as per OTL. On the other hand, as the namesgiving example of chaos theory tells, changes anywhere on the world can have effects anywhere else, so the fundamentalist approach, or at least a strict moderate approach can be seen as more realistic, hence timelines aiming for that usually employ such an approach. Also, it allows to shift focus to different regions of the world, so timelines with the aim of completist coverage of the world also tend towards that.


Example timelines

Fundamentalist approach: How many sixes does Adolf Nazi have to roll? (well, that's the plan), Niall Ferguson's “Virtual History – Alternatives and Counterfactuals”

Between fundamentalist and moderate approach: Decades of Darkness

Moderate approach: The Guns of the Tawantinsuya

Liberal approach: Most strikingly, the Mirror Universe of the Star Trek franchise.


See Also

The Citroen DS Incident, the antithesis of the Butterfly Effect.

General Theory of Alternate History - A discussion by various AH.commers further ruminating on the topic.

What to do about butterflies ? - Discussion on handling the butterfly effect narratively (via butterfly nets or similar solutions), in order to avoid things becoming too complex or too ambitious to cover by one author in a reasonable amount of time.

About the Butterfly Effect - Comment at Sea Lion Press

The page about it on the English Althist Fandom wiki. (German version)


alternate_history/butterfly_effect.txt · Last modified: 2023/07/13 04:56 by max_sinister

Donate Powered by PHP Valid HTML5 Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki