The big idea: what if every little thing you do changes history?
When we contemplate travelling back in time, we’re always given the same warning: be sure not to touch anything. Even one squished bug could irrevocably change the future. You might even write yourself out of existence. Why, then, don’t we think like that about the present? If every tiny change from the past creates our present, then every aspect of our present creates our future, too.
Chaos theory is a definitively established scientific truth about how complex systems are sensitive to tiny changes – that small flukes can have enormous effects. It’s not really a theory; it’s been proved over and over again. It’s why we can’t predict the weather more than a week in advance. If our calculations are off by even a tiny amount, all bets are off.
Those dynamics are simply ignored when we consider humans instead of physical matter. There’s no good reason for it – we’re subject to the same laws of physics as everything else – but we just pretend it isn’t true. Perhaps it’s because what might happen to our future selves if we squished the wrong bug are so overwhelming that it’s easier to pretend the world works differently. But it doesn’t.
That’s why history is often made by seemingly insignificant moments that don’t always make sense. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima rather than Kyoto because a US government official holidayed in Kyoto 19 years earlier; Trump may have decided to run for president in 2016 after Obama publicly humiliated him with one joke in 2011; the Arab spring was sparked by a vegetable vendor in central Tunisia who decided to set himself on fire. We’re told to focus on big, obvious variables – the “signal” – while ignoring “the noise”. But the noise – the buzz of the complexity of society – often profoundly alters our world.
In a broader sense, our species only exists because of a series of flukes. Two billion years ago – and never again – a single bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell and ended up inside it. It evolved into a mitochondrion, making complex life possible, from grass and trees to snails and humans. One hundred million years ago, a shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus, eventually leading to the placenta and, by extension, the reason why we don’t lay eggs. Sixty-six million years ago, a tiny oscillation in the Oort cloud flung an asteroid towards Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, allowing mammals to flourish. If the asteroid had been slightly delayed, humans wouldn’t exist. Everything we’ve achieved would be gone, but for a distant oscillation and a giant space rock. The story of our existence is often written in the margins.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/29/the-big-idea-what-if-every-little-thing-you-do-changes-history
It's true that everything you do changes your life and perhaps, the lives of those around you, but this? I don't know....
= new reply since forum marked as read
Rush*, "Free Will"
(*the band--Not Limbaugh.)
That's a cool T-shirt! I'm jealous!
