Is it likely that my mundane actions, such as buying cigarettes or going to the mall is drastically changing the course of history?
There is no way to know. It could have an effect, or whatever ripples you put out into space-time may just get dampened by the big stuff.
Until time travel or future seeing becomes possible, there’s no way to tell.
Think of the sperm. We’re the result of a specific spermatozoid amongst millions entering an egg. I assume that the slighest change (say, a different step while walking) in the day or probably even week of your father (and probably mother too) would have resulted in someone else (or nobody at all) being born. And this very slight change can be result, direct, secondary or tertiary, etc… of another slight change in someone else behaviour.
You go to the mall, slightly affect the movements of a large number (hundreds? thousands?) of shoppers and drivers. If any of these hundreds or thousands of people beget a child during the following week, it will be a different child from the one who would be born if you had decided not to go to the mall.
So, you removed someone from the gene pool and added someone else. And even if these people don’t reproduce in turn, their mere existence will change the life, in important or in small ways, of a very large number of people. For the next 80 years or so. Again, even if they’re extraordinarily discreet and don’t reproduce, by just being there, they too will change who gets to be born.
And that’s cumulative. I suspect that after these 80 years, you would have a significant part of your country population who will be different people from those who would have lived if you have chosen not to go to the mall. From there, the history of the world has changed (and the changes will become larger and larger with time) because you went to the mall.
All of us are the result of a single sperm cell amongst millions entering an egg. The slighest change (like, say, making a different step while walking) in the life of your father (and probably even mother) during the week before you were conceived (and possibly even earlier than a week) would have resulted in someone else being born rather than you.
You go the mall, affect on your way the moves and actions of presumably hundreds if not thousands of drivers and shoppers, which might in turn change slightly the behavior and moves of multiple other people. If any of these numerous people soon become a parent, his child will be a different person.
Even assuming that this person is very quiet and doesn’t reproduce, over the course of his life, he will affect in very small or very large ways the life of countless people. Which will affect the life of even more people. Including wrt this sperm thing and having people born who wouldn’t otherwise be born. And they in turn…When he will die after, say, 80 years, a non trivial part of your country population will be people who wouldn’t have been born if you hadn’t decided to go to the mall. A couple more generation, and I suspect that the whole world population will owe its life to your visit to the mall.
It doesn’t change it - because it hasn’t happened yet so there is nothing to change. It makes it.
Everything that happens in the future is a result of what we do now.
If I bump into someone and make them arrive home 1 second later than they would have, it will change their action - only slightly, but enough to make a difference. When that person conceives a baby that night, their actions will be slightly different and a different sperm will fertilise the egg, so a different person will be born.
Changes will multiply: we can all do something different and all conceive ‘different’ babies.
We don’t need a time machine, it is quite clear that different choices will lead to different outcomes.
Mundane actions can have large effects, but that isn’t to say that mundane actions always have large effects. Probably the vast majority of the time, mundane actions have mundane effects.
:eek: To think of it in that way means you could also have been responsible for people’s death as well, say decided to grab your soda in the car and you look down once the light turns green, that one second delay could turn into the person behind you in traffic just slightly getting through a yellow light through an intersection and getting hit by a truck. If you just didn’t drink your pop, they’d be alive. It is actually a quite reasonable to think of things this way. But of course there is no way to know for sure except to say is that every action has a reaction. My vote is yes, the butterfly effect is likely to have an impact and the perception of what is mundane varies in interpretation.
Yes, yes it is. So think carefully about** every single decision** you make!
It doesn’t really matter. There’s guaranteed to be some alternate reality in which you don’t think about every decision. Or any decision. Because that’s a decision too.
The overwhelming futility of it all is why a lot of science fiction about this theory of the universe ends up with suicide a lot. E.g., Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways”.
In the old days it took weeks for the butterfly flapping in Africa to shift the course of a Caribbean hurricane by even a few miles. Nowadays, with the Internet amplifying effects and passing them quickly around the globe, world events are much more contingent than before. When an important electoral campaign is underway, every tiny encounter is a possible horror story.
[SPOILER]
Drat! I’ve been living in dread that my complicity would be pointed out. Oh well, I may as well come clean.
On 2nd March 2016 I slept in an extra 5 minutes. I’m not sure why I overslept; I’d love to shift the blame for this if I could but it was my over-sleeping. I won’t bore you with the details of that morning, the toe-stubbing or the pain in tooth #12 when I drank my hot coffee, but the bottom line is I hurried off on errands forgetting to check if I brought my comb. (My wife probably had a comb in her purse but I was reluctant to admit I’d left my own behind: I’ve disappointed her enough already.)
There were lots of little things we might have changed that morning to affect the developing tragedy, but perhaps we were already doomed to our Appointment in Samarra. The check-out girl at the grocery smiled at me. I’m not sure whether she found my disheveled hair manly and sexy, or was just smiling at my clown-like appearance. Either way, I smiled back and, though I’ve never seen that young woman again, that smile affected her … and changed the course of world history.
She called up one of her boyfriends at lunch and made a date; her other boyfriend, with his evening suddenly free, invited another friend out for beer and snooker; so that friend didn’t have time to upload his motorcycle video that evening. The guy in Senegal wouldn’t have clicked on that motorcycle YouTube anyway, but the ordering of his play list was affected and he ended up watching a Bollywood love story.
Perhaps Google shares as much of the blame as I do. Did you know that single Bollywood-click in Senegal was “the camel back-breaking straw” that changed Google’s parameters enough to affect the YouTube playlist of a coffee barista in Washington, D.C.? He ended up watching an episode of Mad Men instead of a documentary on black widow spiders. That afternoon, when Podesta’s aide showed up to get two double cappuccinos with cherries, the barista can hardly be blamed for noting certain physical similarities between the aide and Christine Hendricks. Most men are familiar with the way certain shapes can turn brain to mush, so he can’t really be blamed for the dawdling that led to the aide being 2 minutes late with the coffee. (I won’t name the aide – she’s now seeking solace and anonymity in a convent in the Carpathian Mountains.)
If the aide had just brought Podesta a quick instant coffee from the 7-Eleven, she’d have returned in time to field Podesta’s stupid question before he showed Wikileaks his password. You can see the rest of this horror story on CNN. I might try to blame that Bollywood watcher in Senegal, or the oversexed checker at the Big C Department store who smiled at me. But they were following their predestined courses and I won’t “pass the buck.” I caused the Trump tragedy and take full responsibility. :o[/SPOILER]IIRC, there was a pretty butterfly flapping its wings in our garden on the first of March (the afternoon before my fateful forgetting of comb). I chased the butterfly a bit, and the extra fresh air and exercise helped me sleep more soundly than usual; perhaps it was that butterfly that caused me to oversleep. But I can’t be sure enough to blame that now-deceased insect — and butterflies already get much unjustified condemnation for their hurricanes. It was all my fault and I acknowledge my guilt. Your pity or condemnation won’t affect me either way. I certainly don’t sleep soundly anymore.
Which ignores the argument that small ripples have little effect on overall movements.
For example, one can argue that the American Revolution would have happened almost exactly as it did, even if John Adams had been a slightly different person; the Revolution was the product of the times, not the individual persons involved.
Since this has not been the subject of controlled scientific studies, let’s move this to IMHO and see if it changes the course of history.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Look, I’m not saying that time-traveling dinosaur hunters are real. I’m just saying that I’ve been hearing a lot more about Nazi rallies lately than I used to.
You share 1/(number of sentient creatures in the universe) of the responsibility for whatever happens next.
We can’t say for sure, but it does seem one of the implications of chaos theory is that yes, any physical event will eventually lead to large-scale differences in the world vs a world where that event never happened.
The rub is that “eventually” is arbitrarily long, so it’s something of a race against entropy.
Perhaps the world will be roasted by the sun, or humans nuke the planet to shit before your contribution has had a chance to ripple out. You’re welcome.
Bravo :).
The butterfly effect is best understood backwards, not forwards: Most small things won’t have big repercussions later on. But many big things can be traced back to, or affected by, one small thing.
The best example might be the famous poem, “For Want of a Horseshoe Nail.”
*
For want of a horseshoe nail, the horse was lost.
For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
For want of a rider, the message was lost.
For want of a message, the battle was lost.
For want of a battle, the war was lost.
For want of a war, the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.*
So, for instance: John F. Kennedy was able to be shot dead in 1963 that day in Dallas because he had requested that the protective car canopy be removed because it was such a sunny and beautiful day. If the weather had been bad that day, the canopy would have remained in place. Kennedy most likely wouldn’t be shot that day, and then, you can extrapolate all kinds of outcomes: How does Vietnam play out, if JFK had finished his presidency like normal? Would we still have had a subsequent president Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, etc.? Does 9/11 still happen? Etc.
…All because it was sunny and nice that day in Dallas.
Even in hindsight it is impossible to tell where another path would have lead us.
According to Q in the Tapestry episode of ST:TNG (S6 E15), Piccard’s life was not that important. His not getting stabbed in the heart in the Academy would not affect anyone’s life but his own.
And since clearly the captain of the Flagship of the Federation is much more important than you or I. I must conclude that none of us really matters.