The garden of forking paths
It’s called the butterfly effect and goes something like, “a butterfly can flap its wings and cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.” That’s not exactly true, like most things it’s an easy way to remember the concept. Something small can have a ripple effect that you may not be able to anticipate. In other words, chaos. The problem is chaos, the universe is not deterministic so predicting the future, even the immediate future, comes with a certain level of uncertainty. It’s only in hindsight can we trace back certain events and see the pattern and even then depending on the scale, it’s impossible to know which butterfly caused the hurricane or if the flapping of a butterfly’s wings prevented one.
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Lunatic Laboratories 