• NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 days ago

    According to my interpretation of chaos theory, virtually any change can cause you to not be born. Even if just considering the butterfly effect for weather: a few weeks or months after the change, the weather in the new timeline will completely diverge from the old timeline worldwide, and this will affect your parents’/ancestors’ behavior enough to change which genes get passed on, if they even still make a baby. And that’s only the weather, there’s a lot more chaos in the world.

    The only exception is if the change happens just a short amount of time before you’re conceived, and far enough away. Then I can believe that it could work. But it would still affect your entire life, which might be subtly or totally different from your life in the original timeline.

    All that out of the way, there are quite a few politicians and billionaires I’d like to nominate. Too many to list.

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      The mathematical definition of a chaotic system is that you can find two paths that will eventually diverge to be arbitrarily different. But eventually is a keyword. Two very similar paths can and will progress very similarly for a long time.

      • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 days ago

        It’s impossible to know how long such a change will take to diverge. I guess my weeks/months estimate is baseless, I’ll grant you that. But some changes will have faster effects than others.

        For example, if you remove a very famous person or someone from royalty, it will change the news cycle, which millions of people read all over the place. Each person who reads or would have read the news about it would have their life slightly altered, so this one change causes millions of differences over a large area. With so many changes, it’s likely that one of them will turn out more significant.