Butterflies

By Romana Annette 09/05/2009

Often when I speak of butterflies as symbols, I am referring to their powers of transformation.  Just as caterpillars can turn into objects of beauty, so can people when they shed mundane assigned identities, turn into beings that project their inner glow.

Butterflies have recently acquired a new association.  As they can flitter unpredictably through the air, so can butterflies imply fickle chance and unexpected outcomes due to Chaos Theory, the random and sometimes exponential growth of turbulence in physical systems, which has been nicknamed The Butterfly Effect.  This association has been pursued by modern physics and by science fiction.  A principle focus has been speculation about time travel, and the accompanying threat of disruption that it brings to any predictable grounding in reality.  Normal circumstances can make our lives difficult; just imagine the implications if we could cease to exist at any moment due to past changes, or the ramifications of wars being conducted across time, which would make history itself a battleground.

Are we always suffering after affects from time travel?  How did that jar of raspberry jam we put in the cupboard last week turn into a jar of peanut butter?  Time travel could create a lot of collateral damage.

Mischievous time travel could spell doom for reality.  It could create a new version of Ragnarök, the version of the apocalypse that occurs in Norse mythology, when the gods finally, thoroughly mess everything up.  Time travel could almost be funny too, if a future Loki, the demigod of mischief and fire, decided to play practical jokes across time.

Modern physics allows for the possibility of time travel, though it can supply few mechanisms, especially for human-made machines able to travel in time.  So far, the only way envisioned is if space is warped in such a way that the present comes so close to a past time, that a worm hole might possibly connect the two different realities.  However, worm holes are just as speculative as time travel.  Additionally, the distances in the Universe are so vast that we will never be likely to reach such a worm hole.

Using fictional time travel as an example,, I will analyze the implications.  I will use the motion picture A Sound of Thunder, based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury.  The story is now familiar.  A hunter goes back into time to kill a tyrannosaurus rex before a tree falls and kills it anyway.  People stray from an isolation platform, at which time a butterfly is accidentally stepped on and crushed.  Upon return, the present has changed; the dead butterfly caused it.  There are also paradoxical effects (in the movie,) like tidal waves from the past that consume even more of the familiar present.  People keep going back in the past in an attempt to fix things, but the fixes have a habit of making things worse.

In the context, the present assumes a teleological sacredness.  Predetermined (teleological) fate has already made human history the best way any could be, so every effort must be expended to repair unwanted revisions.  This ignores an obvious fact that reality is always looks correct, regardless how the underlying processes work.  There is also a necessary cinematic gimmick: someone always remembers how things used to be because their memory was not subjected to temporal correction.  This implies that one could have an identity separate from any reality while traveling through time, which again implies a teleological importance for human beings.

Constantly voyaging to the same location and time in history also creates the possibility for conflicts.  How could anyone fix something if they kept bumping into themselves?  There could be endless unintentional humor, but would anyone think it was funny?

I claim that there can be no ideal realities.  The present, as well as memory related to the present, is always based on interrelated processes that were a series of undetermined options followed by determined consequences.  The present also carries with it a scope of connectedness, which can be quite large, when one considers the astronomical number of components (atoms, molecules, cells, etc.) that make up our reality and affect every process in one way or another.  When one adds the possible effects of other universes and extra dimensions, all attempts at visualization go off the charts. 

Even if one could go back to a historical starting point, one cannot assume that strings of events would repeat themselves as before.  There is probably no guarantee that a particular fix could restore a cherished present, regardless how much ingenuity might be brought to the task, since random, unexpected events would likely thwart all human planning.  Some say that reality has a safety valve: historical changes will just create an alternate timeline, since any current reality will automatically be isolated from any and all historical revisions.

I also claim successful time travel would not carry any of the associated, traditional taboos.  I do not believe the future can be free and predestined at the same time, which would be yet another kind of paradox.  One could kill one’s great grandfather, or one could have sex with an ancestor without generating any paradoxes.  These acts would have moral consequences, but no paradoxical consequences.  Paradoxes are teleological and imply that only one present reality can be the correct reality.  In the same manner, butterflies are important to reality, since every component has some effect on the whole, but butterflies cannot be any more important than any other component.

In A Sound of Thunder, while the characters are watching the shooting of a doomed tyrannosaurus, they are impacting the eco-system around the dinosaur.  Dinosaurs were big, so they were walking mini-eco-systems in their own right.  There may have been small pterosaurs that cleaned their teeth and searched their bodies for parasites.  They were likely covered with parasites…maybe ticks the size of a butterfly.  What would happen if one of these ticks (that never died this way the first time around) was crushed by the falling dinosaur?  I can see the headline: Squished Ugly Giant Tick Dooms Future World!

Of all the things to worry about in life, I think the possibility for time travel will be the least troublesome.  If there should be a method by which time travel would be allowed, then there is the possibility that we might develop it in the distant future, but this implies that we might already have traveled back in time.  Such is the logic of time travel.  This also implies that if it were possible to wreck the past, we could already have tried to do so.  We are never kind to our environment. 

If extra-terrestrial aliens invent time travel…well, that is already part of UFO mania.

Reality is already so thoroughly threaded that we cannot comprehend it.  So just imagine if threads from the future could affect threads in the past.  This could mean that we would constantly have to fear the consequences of any and all actions, since their effect upon to the past could come back to haunt us.