With a declining tendency toward religious faith and a depleting trust and sense of
individual significance in systems of community, meaning, culture, economy, and state, facilitated
in large part by the increasing proximity to vast amounts of information, many of us see ourselves
as inconsequential specks destined to pass from dust to ashes with nothing to show for it.
In some sense, this may be true. However, there is one unique source of profound
scientific-based significance that we all possess no matter who we are and what we do. Without the
requirement of any grand illusions of achievement or faith in anything beyond, everyone—you,
I, everyone we know, and everyone everyone knows—is born with this, woven into the very
fabric of our relationship with reality; we wear it in every moment, and it cannot be taken off,
not even by ourselves. It is the fact that each of us will change the course of everything forever.
Let’s consider for a moment that time travel were possible,
and you went back in time some significant number of years. If while you were there,
you affected something, changed something, influenced something to go differently,
stopped or started something that would have otherwise happened or not, and so on, even with
just seemingly tiny, insignificant alterations, it would be highly likely that you would dramatically
change the course of events throughout history thereafter. The proceeding future would become,
potentially, a completely different one—or at the very least, a notably different one.
Most of us accept and understand this. It is the concern, fear, or premise of a vast
majority of films, books, shows, and so on that include time travel as a plot device.
We recognize that affecting a small thing in the past can dramatically change the present, but yet,
we rarely think about how affecting a small thing in the present can dramatically change the future.
Right now, without time travel as an option, reality still works the same way. In every
present moment, your actions, interactions, influences, stopping and starting of things,
and so on, in some likely sense, change the course of the future. Not every little thing we do
always has a major impact on the course of events, but many likely do,
and we do many things both big and small all the time.
This process of how seemingly tiny, insignificant changes can lead to huge consequences is explained
by what is known as the butterfly effect, part of the branch of science and mathematics known
as chaos theory. Chaos theory deals with systems, known as chaotic systems, that react with high
sensitivity to tiny changes in initial conditions and, through chaos, compound and lead to the
generation of completely different, unpredictable outcomes in later states of the systems. Chaos is
sort of a misleading term because this process is truly chaotic in a random sense. Chaotic systems
function according to the laws of motion, physics, and deterministic principles, like everything
else, but because of their immeasurably complex factors and high sensitivity to minute variability
in the initial conditions, they are just nearly impossible to predict and appear chaotic.
Examples of chaotic systems include the weather, aspects of the brain, population dynamics,
ocean turbulence, traffic flow, aspects of the economy, and so on. And of course, reality as
a whole is a chaotic system. It is the total sum chaos of all the chaotic systems, combined.
The most chaotic system a system can be. And of course, we are in this, part and parcel of it.
As a simplified example, consider a scenario in which a person is living with a roommate.
At around noon, this person becomes hungry and decides to have a meal. From the options available
at their apartment, this person decides to make a tomato salad, and they use the last communal
tomatoes in their apartment. Later that night, their roommate plans to have someone whom they are
dating over for dinner and intends to make a pasta dish with homemade tomato sauce. Before their
date arrives, they realize they’re now out of tomatoes and go to the grocery store to get more.
When going to check out, by mere seconds, they get in line in front of another person.
While checking out, the cashier mistakenly puts in the wrong code for the tomatoes
and must clear out and reinput the code, the transaction totaling about three minutes.
While on the drive home, the person who was behind them in line, now delayed by three minutes,
just barely happens by a car accident that had occurred only a short moment earlier.
This person who was in line happens to be an off-duty EMT, and after noticing one the car
accident victims on the ground unconscious, they pull over, get out, and provide the victim CPR,
ultimately saving their life. This now rescued car accident victim, just recently having gotten
married, goes on to live a normal life and have two children with their wife.
Eventually, one of their two children goes on to become highly successful in the medical field
and creates the formulation for a lifesaving medication. As a result, thousands if not millions
of lives are saved by this medication, allowing more lives and families to continue and be born.
Further events would then continue onto and through these new individuals,
affecting more events and leading to more people and things, building and compounding overtime into
a massive webbing of sprawling cause-and-effect, interacting with other chains of cause-and-effect
along the way, all still interlinked with that original tomato salad. Of course,
all of the events, even just the initial delay of the EMT, required many, many other places where
slight changes occurred according to other causes, but ultimately, based on the butterfly effect,
the effects of that one roommate deciding to eat a tomato would at least in some varying
degree of causality continue on until the end of humanity, perhaps the world, and perhaps beyond.
It is not uncommon to hear that one wants to change the world. It is the tagline to so many
people’s dreams and aspirations. It’s a noble and virtuous enough ambition. Arguably, we should
want to focus our efforts on intentionally doing as much good in the world as we can,
trying to change it for the better—because perhaps the more people who try,
the odds increase that it might. But ultimately, if one small action like eating the last tomatoes
can potentially change the entire course of events in the future, what makes us think we could ever
truly know the impact of our other actions? On the timescale of history, good, bad, and neutral
events can never be fully known or identified. But what we can know is that our existence,
although a seemingly insignificant fluke in a blip of time, through the butterfly effect, will flap
out and leave its trailing legacy with potentially increasing dramatic effect for possibly the rest
of history, and perhaps beyond. Chaos theory takes away the long-term predictability of our actions
but gifts us back a perpetual role in reality’s operation. Your legacy,
albeit indirect and anonymous, will continue. It is a flame whose fuse is anything in existence.
This contemplation isn’t a resolution or replacement to having a tangible,
direct sense of purpose through the day-to-day responsibilities of a job, a career, a passion,
a family, a friendship, and so on. But it is to potentially serve as a supplement for when in
those moments when some of the weight seems to suddenly drop out of these things and they feel
illusory, futile, or temporary, and we question if anything we do ultimately matters beyond us, if we
mean anything to anything else, in these moments, we can remember that at least in some sense we do
so much—more than we would probably even like. In the final analysis, either no one matters at
all, or everyone matters completely. There is really no in between. No matter who you are,
because of you, the course of reality’s future will play out in a unique way.
We are not only each the agents of our own story, but we are also agents of the story of humanity,
this earth, and perhaps beyond, collaborating on the unique expression of art that is the future.