A World Connected Through Chaos
Can reading this article change your life 20 years into the future? Potentially.
BY: PAYAL DASS
Photo by Jennifer Lambein via Pinterest
Perhaps you’ve played a game where you are required to make important decisions that affect the outcome of the story. The horror game Until Dawn is about eight friends trapped at their remote mountain retreat, later revealed that they are not alone. The player is required to survive the night until they get rescued. Decisions made on the way, like choosing to investigate a particular room, ultimately mean the difference between life and death for someone in the future of the game. Usually, the decisions and explorations that have the greatest impact on the outcomes are the seemingly smallest of all choices. This notion of having present decisions greatly impacting the future is better known as the concept of the “Butterfly Effect.”
In pop culture, the Butterfly Effect is the phenomenon in which the smallest of choices can have the largest consequences in the future. There have been many film and television representations of it in our mainstream media like the 2004 film The Butterfly Effect or the 2005 film A Sound of Thunder. However, the depiction we see in movies often speed up this process in terms of the consequences playing out. But where did this phenomenon come from?
The Butterfly Effect is the underlying principle of the Chaos Theory. However, the actual meaning and explanation of Chaos Theory is slightly different, and significantly more scientific from the representation we see in mainstream media. The terms ‘Butterfly Effect’ and ‘Chaos Theory’ were coined by MIT meteorology professor Edward Lorenz. He was entering numbers into his computer that were calculated from an equation that, in principle, could predict future weather conditions.
Upon getting the initial printout of the weather forecast prediction, he decided to conduct another run with the same data to confirm the numbers were interpreted correctly by the machine. However, upon reading the final results of the second run-through, he got a drastically different weather prediction. He searched frantically through each number input of the data used to yield the forecast for the second run. He wanted to see what big mistake he had just made that led to such a big difference.
He finally realized that his only mistake was to enter a rounded number—opposed to all significant digits—in one of the many rows and columns of data. His first question was how could such straightforward equations yield such different behavior based on a minuscule difference?
He later published his findings of “sensitivity to initial conditions”—better known today as the “butterfly effect”—as an answer.
Sensitivity to initial conditions is one of the main underlying principles in the mathematical study of chaos. Chaos is the study of states of dynamic systems whose apparent random states and irregularities are governed by deterministic equations that are sensitive to initial conditions. Basically, it is the study of time in a geometrical space. It examines how everything that occurs in this specific point of time is created by the workings of chaotic, complex systems even though they appear to be completely random.
The Butterfly Effect, which is a mechanism of chaos, is when each point in the chaotic system is always close to others, but ultimately each has different futures or trajectories. Thus, a small change in trajectory can lead to a significantly different future behaviour. Applying the same concept to Lorenz’s weather predictions, the small flaps of a butterfly wing can change the behaviour of air pressure and build up within the atmosphere. Hence, as time goes by, the build-up of this air pressure can ultimately lead to a cyclone breaking out on the other side of the world.
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But why was such a scientifically complex theory regarding future and time given the beautiful name of the Butterfly Effect?
When mapping the journey of a point in the chaotic system using a Lorenz attractor, the seemingly random but actually determined path it takes resembles the shape of a butterfly.
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Keeping the same principles and depictions of the butterfly effect from science and pop culture, here’s how it affects our daily lives.
Our society can be viewed as a system in which every person, family, business, and institution plays a specific role. Each role ultimately helps society sustain itself and progress towards a brighter future. When one role is not being fulfilled properly, it can affect the entire system. Theoretically, if one person makes the wrong decision, it could have a powerful impact on society. Our society can also be viewed as a networking system. This networking system requires various sources to sustain and prevent itself from breaking down. When one source, out of many sources, fails to provide the specific input required for the system to sustain itself, the entire network could shut down.
With all this being said, has there ever been events where the phenomenon has taken place in the real world?
History could be the best source to look for butterfly effects. For example, the Chernobyl disaster could have been the reason global warming and climate change are such big issues in today’s society.
In 1986, a test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant went wrong, which caused 400 times the radiation produced by the bombing of Hiroshima to be released. 115,000 people were evacuated from the area with many deaths and birth defects following the explosion and excessive radiation exposure. Although the test had caused significant damage to everything around it, it could have been much worse if three men had not prevented a second explosion. Three plant workers—Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov—volunteered to turn off the underwater valves to prevent a second explosion from taking place. They did the heroic act of diving into radioactive water. Had they failed to turn off the valve, half of Europe would have been destroyed and been uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. This includes Russia, Ukraine, and Kiev. It is said that these three men had stilled the wings of a deadly butterfly.
The explosion was caused by poor design and poorly trained staff. However, this explosion has caused long-term effects on society on a global level. Apart from the significant impact on the people that lived there during the explosion, it has created universal anxiety towards nuclear power plants. It developed a bias against nuclear power, and as a result, led to the global preference for the usage of fossil fuels. Many speculate that it was because of the Chernobyl explosion that global warming has become irreversible in society today. Had the explosion not happened, less power would be sourced from fossil fuels, thus, less greenhouse gases would have been emitted into the atmosphere, preventing global temperatures from rising.
Many skeptics out there may say that the rise of fossil fuels was not solely because of the Chernobyl disaster. They may claim that it was simply a cheaper way to produce a significant amount of energy. It may have also been the most profitable method of power sourcing for companies. Many might say that one single event cannot be the sole reason a global issue of such a grand scale, so far into the future, could occur. There are many critiques of the Chaos Theory as well. This is mainly because the concept of chaos challenges our deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality. It is also known for being associated with dynamic and non-linear systems, meaning it cannot effectively work with a linear concept like time.
But, there is no evidence saying that none of these events were connected. The study of chaos states that “each point in the chaotic complexity system leads to different future behaviour.” Chaos also addresses the unpredictable ways initial conditions of one system can affect another system’s behaviour. To think that every little thought, decision, and action of each individual has an effect on larger events in the future doesn’t seem unbelievable if you really think about it. Everyone makes decisions that ultimately make them end up in different places as time goes by.
Choices are what shape the stories of our future and our world.
This may serve as a warning for many of us who think our choices may not have such a big impact on the world right now or in the near future. We may have a bigger impact on the future than we think. Although it seems unlikely that not making your bed for one day may affect your future drastically, a thing called chaos that ties the whole universe together may beg to differ.
