If only someone had knocked on the door

As a child I had a morbid fear of sci-fi and would desist from reading anything that required imagining objects and beings that I hadn’t come across in my life as a human. After all nightmares replete with my school principal and the creatures that infested his interminable moustache were predicament enough for an 11 year old. But then, reeling under the might of peer-pressure – I succumbed.

The world that I dreaded to death had gone nuclear with The Matrix and the subsequent cerebral coup had brought about the capitulation of the rest of my brain. Could I be just a battery? All I needed was a sign or perhaps a red/blue pill and I would renounce everything materialistic in the world and embark upon an epic odyssey in pursuit of the Truth/Golden Fleece. Am still waiting for that flash….

Last week I watched a movie called The Butterfly Effect and was flabbergasted by the basic plot, which can be gathered from the statement below:

“A butterfly flapped its wings 60 years ago in Brazil, and today an earthquake hit China.” –Chaos Theory

Basically a small variation in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the system.

Those of you, who are contemplating about leaving this blog right away to safeguard yourself from the tortures of another ludicrous hypothesis, bear with me for a while. The fact that you are reading my blog right now instead of doing anything else is affecting the future in profound ways. Because of your decision - everyone in the future will be different people than they would have been had you made a different choice.

“and it is this simple act, now, which unleashes the fires of life
from rock on a far away world six hundred million years from now”

At least, so the theory says.

Illustrating the principle is a sci-fi tale A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, in which a future time traveler goes back to the dinosaur age, breaches protocol by stepping out of a restricted area and accidentally tramples a butterfly. Upon returning to the present, he finds the world to be a somewhat different from than the one he left. All of history has been changed slightly by the death of a single butterfly in the distant past.

A parallel can be drawn between the effect and Karma (the totality of a one’s actions in any one of the successive states of one’s existence, thought of as determining the fate of the next stage) - the law of cause and effect. Your actions create ripples that spread out, echo and interfere with the ripples from the actions of others. Quoting Kofi Annan, “The world of human activity also has its own "Butterfly Effect" - human actions can either save the world or destroy it.” The Butterfly Effect reminds us to be conscious of our actions, the brittleness of life and our inherent liability in the disposition of all things.

Imagine the world today if someone knocked on the door of Hitler's parents’ house the moment he was being conceived.