this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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I actually think that's because "the butterfly effect" has been massively overblown in time travel media.
Like, realistically the biggest issue with you going back in time is that you'd probably end up introducing a plague in the past that would wipe out a ton of life; not exactly a minor change. However, if we ignore that, and you don't try to do anything radical like inventing electricity a thousand years too early, what would your presence in the past actually do? As long as you were willing to keep your head down, learn the local language, and live the peasant life, what grand consequences could you cause? None.
The though experiment behind the butterfly effect is: Assume a weather simulation, which is extremely precise, but there's a butterfly, that flaps its wings, which is not accounted for in the simulation. This will, after a while, cause the simulation to divert so wildly from reality that its no better than chance at predicting the weather.
So applied to time travel, you'd come back to a world that is drastically different from the one you left, but not necessarily better or worse than the one you left.
Sure, in an on paper theory. My argument would be that the butterfly flapping its wings are not nearly strong enough to change the flow of weather in reality.
I don't know why commentors are thinking I don't understand the theory. I do, I simply do not believe that it maps to reality. It's ultimately been taken too far as a trope, even though most of its examples in media often involve characters making dramatic changes.
I don't think you understand the theory at all considering that the central concept of defining any system as chaotic is that the tiniest imperceptible change of initial conditions leads to an unpredictable product.
If you think the strength of the butterfly wing is insufficient for this theory to map to reality then you have missed the point entirely of why a butterfly was chosen as the example to describe this theory.