Butterfly Of Doom - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Butterfly Effect

"It's called the Butterfly Effect. You step on a Butterfly, and a year later three million people end up dead."

— Angela Petrelli, Heroes

Martha Jones: But are we safe? Can we move around and stuff?

The Doctor: Of course we can. Why do you ask?

Martha Jones: It's like in the films! You step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race!

The Doctor: [Bemused] ... I'll tell you what then, don't... step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?

— "The Shakespeare Code", Doctor Who

Want to go back in time to stop your parents from losing their retirement money in the Dotcom crash? Save a loved one from a fatal accident? Even just nudge a closet a little to the left to avoid hitting your toe? In some universes, you're not just going to run into You Cant Fight Fate, but into Finagles Law on a grand scale: the Butterfly Of Doom. Any and every change made in the past will always have an unintended and horrible secondary side effect. Much like a temporal Monkey's Paw, the initial effect might come to pass, but at a terrible cost. Telling your parents to move their money elsewhere precipitates the crash early and brings about a second Great Depression, the loved one you saved develops a wasting terminal cancer, the closet you moved is now on a weak floorboard and crashes through it, waking up a nest of termites that bring down your house.

Generally part of an Anvilicious story about accepting things as they are, this is the sword held over the head of repeat offenders of Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act who insist on changing the past. The resulting world can range from a dark Alternate Universe to a full-blown Mirror Universe. Heroes can usually Set Right What Once Went Wrong, by undoing the original change that started it with a bit of Rubber Band History.

This trope is named partly for the "butterfly effect", a metaphor for an aspect of chaos theory which was coined by Edward Lorenz. The idea is that certain dynamic systems (such as the weather or global climate), when affected by small changes (a butterfly flapping its wings) unfold in essentially unpredictable ways (there's a hurricane instead of the expected sunshine half a world away). This is the "sensitive dependence upon initial conditions" which boggles long-range weather forecasting. It also refers to Ray Bradbury's seminal time travel story A Sound of Thunder, which centred on the disastrous consequences of a butterfly's death in the past. By a marvellous coincidence, this was written some ten years before Lorenz started pondering the inaccuracies of his forecasting computer.

In theoretical discussions of Time Travel, this is sometimes referred to as "Avalanche Time", evoking an image of ever-growing cascading changes that race forward through the timeline, obliterating everything familiar to the time traveler who set it off.

There is a philosophical history regarding this one as well. Leibniz famously theorized that God made this the best of all possible realities. Ergo, any change would be tampering with perfection. The Butterfly of Doom is therefore in Western media God being sort of a dick. (Leibniz's philosophy was famously parodied by Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide, who, no matter what horrendous atrocity he beheld, would exclaim how this is necessary in a perfect world).

The Aesop of Wonderful Life.
See also Finagles Law, Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act, You Cant Fight Fate.
A subtrope of For Want Of A Nail. Make A Better World is the opposite scenario.

Examples

The archetypal example - from which the trope name and the page quotes descend — would be Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story "A Sound of Thunder".
Similarly, the science fiction story "Aristotle and the Gun" by L. Sprague de Camp has an arrogant time traveller trying to change history, and achieving the exact opposite of what he intends.
The majority of the first Back to the Future movie is Marty trying to reverse the effect of him saving his father from being hit by a car.
- Arguably subverted over the course of the trilogy — ultimately, changing the past has nothing but positive effects for most involved castmembers.
  - But not intentionally. In fact, almost all of Marty's intended timeline changes end up nearly erasing him from existence. All the positive changes came from unintentional changes - most notably his "Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan" schtick, intended to spook his teenage dad into asking for a date, instead inspires him to become a professional science-fiction author. And an off-hand comment in a diner inspires a young minimum-wage soda-jerk to become the town's popular mayor.
In the Family Guy episode "Meet the Quagmires", Peter travels back in time to 1984 to enjoy a night of carefree teenage fun. As a result of his antics, upon his return to the present he's married to Molly Ringwald, President Al Gore has eliminated terrorism and pollution, Dick Cheney accidentally shot himself, Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson, and (oh horrors!) Chevy Chase is the host of the Tonight Show.
- This is arguably a subversion, or at least an inversion, of the usual Butterflyof Doom effect: instead of fixing what turns out to be a petty personal problem at the expense of ruining the entire world as he knows it, Peter unwittingly ushers in (what some might consider to be) a utopian alternate history- his own marriage being the only casualty.
Both the novel and the film Millennium conclude with a runway "timequake" obliterating the future, because of an accidental change made to the timeline in the present.
"Timewaves" are the result of the change in history in the very loose film adaptation of "A Sound of Thunder".
Lampshaded in Teen Titans: Cyborg accidentally time travels to ancient times and reminds himself, "Don't do anything, don't touch anything. Sci-Fi Rule #1: You start messing with the past, you end up with monkeys ruling the future." Of course, in the end, his actions are for the better.
Invader Zim gives an even bigger Lampshade Hanging in the episode "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy." Professor Membrane explains that any attempt to travel back in time and change history is likely to create a future that is worse for the traveler (or cause, say, a giant fish in a bear suit to attack Tokyo). The Professor finishes, "Anyone who would want to build a space-time object replacement device is a complete moron!" Of course, the next thing we see is Zim saying "Gir, the space-time object replacement device is ready!"
And let's not forget the movie The Butterfly Effect, named for the effect which names this trope, and is the most notorious embodiment of this.
- The Butterfly Effect is also notable for the fact that the protagonist not only learns that messing with time can have disastrous consequences, he also realises that he himself is a product of someones tinkering with fate, and the world can't truly be righted unless he is no longer in it.
Subverted in an episode of Scrubs appropriately entitled "My Butterfly," where a butterfly affects what happens for the rest of the day, ending in the death of a patient. When the butterfly changes where it lands, the episode features an alternate future where everything goes better, but the patient still dies on the table.
An Animorphs Super Special dealt with a villain changing time around. Some things were better, some things were worse; World War II, of course, was one of the affected areas. Much of the conflict of the book is over whether to restore the world or keep it the new way, and what justifies preserving bad pieces of history.
- In fourth Megamorphs was arguably a Butterfly of Doom, as the Drode convinces Jake to allow Crayak to alter time so the Animorphs will never have met Elfangor. Which all goes horribly wrong, when the Animorphs try to meddle accidentally, leading to a brutal, all-out military invasion of Earth by the Yeerk fleet. Then Cassie destroys the timeline somehow, and everything goes back to normal.
The Doctor Who episode "Father's Day" clearly has An Aesop against changing the past for your own benefit — the damage Rose deals to the timeline by saving her father from what was supposed to be his death unleashes flying batwinged insectoid demons devouring everything in sight, including the Doctor. Only when Rose's father deliberately gets himself hit with the car that was supposed to accidentally hit him does time get back on its original track... with one tiny difference.
- This is a little more the result of a temporal paradox than changing an event - two versions of the Doctor and Rose directly changing what they just did (running across their field of vision), and the 'reapers' coming to clean up the mess. It's implied that this sort of thing is a danger since the demise of the Time Lords (as they may have handled, or had a hand in controlling, other such paradoxes).
Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within actually uses this trope, but with a twist — instead of unexpected consequences, there is an actual guardian of time that hunts the Prince in order to restore time to its original flow.
This is played with in Donnie Darko; the setup is used without the character messing up the past, and the plague of strange events that follow him all lead him to go back in time and allow himself to be in bed when an airplane crashes into his house, thus saving his girlfriend's life in a roundabout way.
- More than that, The dvd commentary says that Donnie's purpose was to give the plane engine a reason for existing, preventing the collapse of the universe.
Literary example: The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator involves a time traveler teenager making repeated trips into the future. Each time he discovers a bad future, and tries to fix it in the present or past. Each time, his actions only make it worse. He eventually realizes the reason ( In all futures, he has the time machine and he's using it to control events), but not before he gets his time-traveling Evil Overlord future self chasing him to stop himself from messing up the past (present for the teenager) that lead to his present (future).
Isaac Asimov's novel The End of Eternity. Only in this case, the constant changing of the potential timelines by a secret trans-temporal time agency resulted not in unpredictable chaos but in a static history, because the time agency tried to erase, with the best intentions, every invention, trend or development that they regarded a danger to Mankind and human life in general... erasing wars, but also deliberately killing all attempts at space exploration throughout the various millennia the agency's computers had access to. In the end, only the destruction of the time agency itself allowed the restoration of Mankind's original timeline: a life full of risks in search for the Unknown, but also with the potential to colonize the galaxy and survive into the distant future after the Earth's sun had gone nova.
Another fine example of how one man's repeated attempts at changing the past to find the "perfect" timeline are leading to ever more disastrous consequences is the two-parter episode ''Year of Hell'' from the 4th season of Star Trek: Voyager. Things are spiraling out of control, precisely because the timeship is based on the idea of Laplace's Demon which is contradicted by both Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory. In the end the original timeline can only be restored by destruction of the timeship (which had existed "outside time" while aboard centuries of subjective time passed), which Captain Janeway brings about by ramming it with the Voyager, destroying both ships in the process and "resetting" the timeline back one year. Basically, a giant Reset Button finale, but one of the few times in the Voyager series in which the Reset Button actually made sense from the context of the episode.
- And even in what is widely considered to be the original series' best episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever," the world falls to Nazi Germany and Starfleet never forms because one woman didn't die when she was supposed to.
This was subverted in Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent. When the faculty of the Unseen University find themselves trapped centuries or even millennia before they were ever born, Ponder Stibbons invokes the ever-popular "kill your own grandfather" example of why you shouldn't muck around with things in the past. Archchancellor Ridcully dismisses Ponder's concerns with a rather more logical "whatever happens stays happened" attitude, pointing out that, having killed one's own grandfather and ceased to exist, no one would exist to step on the ant, meaning your grandfather was never killed, thereby creating a circular paradox wherein doing something makes you unable to do it. He also observes that he is unlikely to kill his own grandfather, as he "rather liked the chap." He then elaborates that, therefore, since they're in the past, they were very clearly there once already (ie now), and therefore any ants that are stepped on, are vitally important in their capacity of being stepped on. The Bursar later attempts to take this to heart by jumping around on ants in between walking into trees.
- This subversion of the Butterfly Of Doom theory is itself a well-respected alternate theory of how time travel might work; in a real sense Ridcully is simply the Discworld inventor of an idea that many writers of time travel stories already accept in our world.
  - Of course, Quantum Weather Butterflies do exist on the Disc. Did we expect any less?
Also subverted in 2002's movie adaptation of The Time Machine, wherein Alexander Hartdegen's repeated attempts to go back in time to save his fiancee Emma inevitably go wrong, leading to her death in another way. Later, the Uber-Morlock explains that the reason he cannot go back in time to save Emma is that her death was his prime motivation for building the time machine in the first place.
- Actually, this is in accordance with modern physics theory. Relativity allows an object or information to travel backwards in time. But Quantum Mechanics prevents the time traveler from doing anything that would prevent the time travel from taking place''. So you can go back in time and shoot your grandfather ... as long as that shooting had no effect on your eventual decision or ability to travel back in time. If it did, then it would be impossible.
Played with in the MST 3 K episode, Time Chasers, which is about a nerdy scientist who invents a time machine, and then has to go back in time and prevent an earlier version of himself from giving it to a Corrupt Corporate Executive. The original versions of the scientist and his girlfriend end up dying while the "earlier" versions of them manage to keep the time machine from falling into evil hands. The movie's premise gets parodied in the between-movie skits, in which Crow goes back in time to prevent Mike from taking the temp job that results in his being shot into space. Unfortunately, Mike dies in his alternate fate-line and his Evil Twin brother Eddie gets shot into space in his stead. Crow goes back in time again to tell the earlier version of himself not to warn Mike, and, as a result, the earlier version of himself gets stuck in the past where he will presumably remain, as an employee of the cheese factory where "earlier" Mike worked.
There is a sort of this in Seven Days. It's stated that simply backstepping (Going back in time one week) already changes the timeline because the Sphere materializes and changes air currents, causing airplanes to land a bit sooner/later and the like. Of course, I don't think it was ever explained further than that.
Averted in Poul Anderson's series of "Time Patrol" novellas and short stories. Anderson posits a kind of "temporal inertia" which makes drastic effects resulting from changes in the past just about impossible—it takes a real effort at key points in the timeline to effect changes. The reverse side of that coin poses a challenge to the hero of the stories, for once the timeline has been changed the same temporal inertia makes it extremely difficult to get it to revert to its original flow. In some cases the titular Time Patrol has to settle for merely mitigating the damage caused by changes to the timeline.
Pretty much the impetus for the plot of Madeline L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet: Mad Dog Branzillo will succeed in nuking the earth (why, exactly, he's decided to do this is never really explained, except that it's generally a major temper tantrum directed toward the West for screwing up the environment) unless Charles Wallace goes back in time and changes the Might-Have-Beens in humanity's history. Thus, Branzillo's very distant ancestors never waged fratricidal war; his ancestor Zylle is never hanged as a witch for being an Indian with blue eyes; and the descendents of the two brothers married, everything was changed, so "Mad Dog" Branzillo was always El Zarco, "the Blue-Eyed".
Hysterically parodied a Whitest Kids u Know sketch. Everytime Trevor and Zack try to change history, random things seem to happen (because that's how physics works). They go back in time, and kill Hitler, which cause JFK turns into a panda bear. They try to stop two Godzilla-esque monster from attacking each other and accidentally caused the Vietnam War (they call it a draw). After preventing 9/11, one of the character's sister start to disapear from a picture (a parody of Back to the Future). In response, they then scream out "We have go back and save 9/11!"
In the now likely defunct webcomic Adventures of John and Dave, Dave goes back in time about three weeks to play a prank on Air Force One and finds that this caused Germany to win World War II.
Subverted in the film Frequency. A shortwave radio and the Northern Lights allow the main character to communicate with his father thirty years back in time, and he succeeds in saving him from the fire that he died in (among other things). Unfortunately, the father's presence where he should have been absent indirectly saves the life of a serial killer, and things only get worse from there. However, instead of the characters learning a lesson about messing up history, they continue to use the radio to try to track down the killer, and by the end of it, all the characters (save, perhaps, the new victims of the serial killer) wind up with lives much better than where they started.
The movie Sliding Doors had a non-timetravel variation, the movie follows the events following the protagonist either missing the subway or getting on just in time, and then some...
In the third Pendragon book, The Never War, the characters at first think that in order to make the turning point go correctly, they must stop the Hindenburg from being destroyed. However, they ask the Traveler from Third Earth (the far future) to analyze what would happen if they did it. It turns out that the world would pretty much be destroyed if they go through with it. After a rather huge misunderstanding because one character didn't get that last bit of info, they finally manage to let time go on its proper course.
- And then, in the later books, Mark brings incredibly advanced technology into the past, jumpstarting the computer industry and advancing technology's development. Of course, also thanks to Mark, we also get the future dystopia seen in Raven Rise because of a stupid decision he made in 1939.
In Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, it's implied that the apparently futile actions of a single patient in a mental institution will affect whether the future holds a sustainable, egalitarian utopia or a polluted colony of virtual prisoners and sex-slaves.
Averted in the Tabletop RPG Feng Shui, where the universe actively resists attempts to change it. To illustrate it, the sourcebook gives the classic example of a man going back in time to kill his own grandfather. If Johnny Chang goes back in time and kills his grandfather, he returns to the present to find that his name is Johnny Fang now but nothing else has changed. In Feng Shui, world history bows to the whims of the people in control of the world's feng shui sites, and anything done by insignificant time travellers just gets corrected for.