Pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect' and gets it wrong
The actual Butterfly Effect sometimes gets me thinking. Unlike what&#x27;s popular in time travel fiction, it seems to me that even the tiniest change would cause a <i>completely</i> different world, with completely different people inhabiting it, about a generation or so deeper.<p>As a stupid example, consider the change being a tree branch falling in the Serengeti. A small animal, which would otherwise have just continued eating, scuttles away. It crosses a nearby road, causing a nearly imperceptible slowdown for a woman on here way to the airport. She arrives just a few seconds later, but it&#x27;s enough for the pattern of people in the hall to change and her to not see a sandwich shop she would have seen at a glance. She arrives meeting her husband, sleeps with him just like in the original timeline--but because she&#x27;s slightly more hungry, did slightly different things on the plane, and so has slightly different discussions, they sleep with each other a tiny bit earlier or later, in an ever so slightly different position, but completely enough to either not cause conception of the child they would have conceived originally, or the conception of a different child (different sperm, different combination of genetic material, and so on).<p>And now it&#x27;s obvious. The child is essentially a completely different person, with completely different thoughts, actions, being not exactly where the original child would habe been throughout its life at practically <i>all</i> moments (even if they go to the same school, they&#x27;re unlikely to stand in the same spot in the hallway at all times). Blocking other people&#x27;s view, or slowing them down, or causing them to go somewhere else. Causing many many &quot;tree branches&quot; of its own, many of which result in people meeting or not meeting other people, or having different offspring regardless, and so on.<p>Now, consider that this was just looking at one consequence of the falling tree branch. There are many more. The point is, it can be the tiniest things that ripple through time to entirely change who is populating earth a few decades later.<p>In media, even when the change is &quot;prevent World War II&quot;, today&#x27;s world almost always gets portrayed with the same characters and same personalities, that somehow still all met. I don&#x27;t blame the writers, though, it certainly makes for a more entertaining story.