I tend to believe that all possibilities are simultaneous in multidimensions. That every, all, and infinite possibilities are now and every moment in a holograph of panultimate reality. Infinity in each moment… infinite variable, infinite being, all superimposed from dimension to dimension outside of time. supporting and diverging, beginning, branching, and simultaneously annihalated all within the same moment-- only to begin again in the next. Time is an illusion created by the infinite. Time is the bounds of this particular dimension…in other dimensions time is relative and doesn’t order the box.
The future is built on the present. The present is built on millions of large and small events. If one of those events is different the future will be different in detail but it will be the same in general. That is, if one small event in the present is changed so as to prevent a large event from happening, sooner or later the occurance of some small event will cause another large event and, on the average, the future will be a similar conglomeration of events large, small, medium sized, good, bad and indifferent.
You can take that to the bank.
Quite possibly the most profound thing I have ever read on this board.
This raises the philosophical question of Multiplcity of Causes. For the subject of alternate histories, it can be paraphrased as “Is the present the result of one and only one possible past, or could different pasts converge on an identical present?” For example, there’s the old saw about “what if the universe was created just a second ago, with all our memories in place; how would we know?” -which is arguably possible, though fantastically unlikely, on quantum mechanical grounds. For reasons I don’t know, the possibility that the past isn’t certain is almost never addressed; physicists for example take a fixed certain past for granted.
I think in terms of the major events of your own life you can trace a big event back to a little decision that set a chain of events in motion. I’ve done it with my own life. For example how I met the father of my child or met some of my very best-friends.
On the other hand I’ve noticed that life sometimes gives you more than one opportunity to know someone (not necessarily to love, just to know) and I try to take that hint.
My wife and I are from opposite sides of the earth. There were any number of small things that led to us meeting each other. If even a few of those things had turned out differently it would have been very unlikely that we even would have met. I do want to say though that I’m glad things worked out the way they have.
I agree that writers and everyday people don’t often appreciate how little it takes to disrupt a situation and often make it sound like it has to be much more macro and persistemt than it really takes. You often hear about 4 friends travelling home from a party. One decides to stay a little longer and the first three get hit and killed by a truck. The message is usually presented that the fourth one would have died as well. I say almost certainly not. The act of getting killed in a given accident is extremely fragile and milliseconds probably would have made all the difference and it would have never happened at all with another person getting in the car, jabbering the whole time etc.
I also agree that pregnancy and genetics is a huge key to the whole effect. One person will have more and more descendants as time goes on until the gene pool for all of humanity is intertwined with a given individual. The process of fertilization is always like a lottery and can be thrown off by the smallest thing and therefore changes humanity from that point forward.
That’s true of my wife and I and she came from a little town 7 miles down the road. After high school she went to work as a soda jerk in a drug store I patronized. If she had gone to work in a dress shop instead, doubless we never would have met.