Have You Experienced "The Butterfly Effect?"

[The_War_Wagon]

God put that bug in my truck to save me from a horrendous accident.

Kids & I were up fishing in rural Butler Co. last Saturday, where nothing EVER happens... and THIS happened.

We stayed a little longer to fish (got sunburned in the process!), and ended up driving right THROUGH this; AFTER the guy shot her, but BEFORE the cops got there - we missed it by a couple of minutes at most.

I'm glad my kids didn't see it, & the jerkass didn't hit us (was gone already), trying to speed off to the cemetery to commit suicide.

[jpmuscle]

Kids & I were up fishing in rural Butler Co. last Saturday, where nothing EVER happens... and THIS happened.

We stayed a little longer to fish (got sunburned in the process!), and ended up driving right THROUGH this; AFTER the guy shot her, but BEFORE the cops got there - we missed it by a couple of minutes at most.

I'm glad my kids didn't see it, & the jerkass didn't hit us (was gone already), trying to speed off to the cemetery to commit suicide.

Having lived a couple years in Butler Co. and not to far from Eau Claire when I was young I can say in the affirmative there is something in the water there.


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Kids & I were up fishing in rural Butler Co. last Saturday, where nothing EVER happens... and THIS happened.

We stayed a little longer to fish (got sunburned in the process!), and ended up driving right THROUGH this; AFTER the guy shot her, but BEFORE the cops got there - we missed it by a couple of minutes at most.

I'm glad my kids didn't see it, & the jerkass didn't hit us (was gone already), trying to speed off to the cemetery to commit suicide.

This isn't really a butterfly effect story, but your post reminded me of an incident I experienced a few years ago that definitely fits "the creepy files."

I used to live in Las Cruces, New Mexico, that I now frequent only for trips into town for supplies, etc.

I hated driving all the way to the public range several miles out of town, so I used to take my rifle shooting in a desert area near the city dump just outside the city limits.

On one particular occasion, I noticed a large burnt spot on the ground. The spot was well-defined like someone had spread an accelerant on the ground and the chemical burning had been confined to just the one area. Thing is: I couldn't see any object, trash, tree stump, or anything else that had been burned. I thought, "this is odd. Wonder what they were burning?"

When I got home I just happened to pick up the newspaper that had been delivered to my home.

While looking through it I landed on an article about a local woman's body that had been found recently....burned...in a desert area near the city dump.

I had missed being the one to find her body by a few days, probably not too long after the police had finished collecting their evidence and had removed the barrier tape.

EDITED TO ADD: Here's the story.

https://www.abqjournal.com/news/stat...nm08-30-04.htm

Kathryn "Katie" Sepich was a business student working on her master's degree, had a serious boyfriend and seemed to have a promising future at the time of her death, family and friends said.
The 22-year-old was last seen leaving a party early Aug. 31, 2003. Friends told detectives she planned to walk the two blocks to her apartment.
Target shooters discovered her body at the old Las Cruces city dump later that day. The Carlsbad native had been strangled, sexually assaulted and parts of her body had been burned. An autopsy revealed that she had a blood-alcohol level of 0.25, more than three times the legal limit of 0.08.

They finally did find the perp. Guess what? He was an illegal alien:

https://www.donaanacounty.org/node/136702

December 22, 2006
Doña Ana County Sheriff Todd J. Garrison and Third Judicial District Attorney Susana Martinez announced at a press conference today that convicted felon Gabriel Adrian Avila, 27, has confessed to the 2003 rape and murder of Katie Sepich.

Avila, a Mexican national, has been an inmate in the New Mexico Corrections System since November of 2004, when he was sentenced to nine years for aggravated burglary and intent to commit aggravated assault. The offenses occurred in November, 2003, about nine weeks after the Sepich murder.

At the time Avila was processed into the corrections system, his DNA was sampled and set aside for testing. The sample was not tested until a few weeks ago, and it immediately provided a partial match to DNA found on Sepich’s body.

Investigators obtained a search warrant to get a new sample from Avila, and on Dec. 11, the samples matched. Investigators subsequently questioned Avila, who provided details of the murder scene that only he could have known. He soon will be formally charged with capital murder and rape, Martinez said. She said Avila and Sepich had never met until the night of the murder, when he saw her walking home.

Investigators also have located and seized the truck used to transport Sepich’s body from the murder scene to a former dumpsite east of Las Cruces. Avila told investigators he raped and killed Sepich outside her bedroom window in the early morning hours of Sunday, Aug. 31, 2003. The truck had been sold, and the new owner consented to its seizure. Investigators also were able to obtain a ring worn by Sepich on the night of the murder. The ring had been left in the truck. Both the truck and the ring are being processed for evidence.

Sepich, 22 at the time, of Carlsbad, was a graduate student of business administration at New Mexico State University. She had attended a party Saturday night, Aug. 30, in the neighborhood of Veterans’ Park. She left the party sometime after midnight.

At about 11 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 31, target shooters reported the discovery of a partially clothed body in the desert near the old city dump east of Las Cruces. Doña Ana County Sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene shortly after noon and began investigating the death as a homicide. In the meantime, Sepich’s roommates reported to police that she had not returned home.

More than 100 people were interviewed during the course of the investigation, which attracted national media attention.

In announcing Avila’s confession, Garrison said several area law-enforcement agencies contributed to the investigation. He singled out the Las Cruces Police Department, the New Mexico State Police and the New Mexico State University Police Department.

After Garrison and Martinez spoke, Sepich’s mother and father – Jayann and Dave Sepich – thanked law enforcement, the Las Cruces community and the media for keeping hope alive that their daughter’s killer could be brought to justice.

“Next Tuesday would have been Katie’s birthday,” Jayann Sepich said. “She would have been 26. This is a very fitting birthday present for our daughter, Katie.”

Jayann Sepich also vowed that she and her husband will continue to work to have Katie’s Law passed in all 50 states as a tribute to their daughter. The law – which takes effect in New Mexico on Jan. 1, 2007 – will require DNA samples to be collected at the time of arrest on any violent felony charges. The samples will be placed into a database for comparison to DNA samples associated with unsolved crimes.

Martinez said that if Katie’s Law had been in effect in 2003, Avila would have been brought to justice much sooner.

Oddly enough, if Katie had left the party a few minutes earlier or later she might still be alive.

I wonder what "butterfly effect" happened at the party to make her leave exactly when she did?

[Honu]

I get the idea but every single thing can be tied to this
how far back do you go in timeline ? 2 minutes 10 a hour a day a year ?

every single thing could be tied to every single event is the problem

but again can see its a fun thing to try to find and go OK here is where something happened ?
IMHO one is just trying to find something that is not really there and trying to make reason of it etc.


that wearing a rock shirt idea that guy offered someone a job but reality is another guy was going to offer them a even better job kinda thing

getting on the plane that crashed they would have been the sole survivor and then met their future wife through talks they did and been insane wealthy something they always wanted to be or so on ? and then both get in a car get in a accident she dies you lose your eyesight ? and your life then sucks ? how far back do you go to other events that shaped you after that so called moment cause those moments are all real cause does that person say if I did not get on the flight or do they trace it back to I had to go OH I forgot my wallet and ran back in to get it ? cause that was not it was the fact he was on a flight and why was he on that flight anyway etc..

that coin toss ? if you had not take that stupid job that put you in the airport to get on the plane you never would have been there so blame the job ? heck go back to HS to the counselor that said HEY you ever thought about studying this ? or to your parents for even moving to that city when you were 3 cause that is where it all started maybe ?

so that moment is not a moment but a long leading chain of events if you want to think of it that way and its never ending always changing and started before you were born

Oddly enough, if Katie had left the party a few minutes earlier or later she might still be alive.

I wonder what "butterfly effect" happened at the party to make her leave exactly when she did?

using that ? if her parents had moved before she was born like they wanted to ?
if she had not become friends with someone ten years earlier in her childhood that lead her to going not to let down her long time friend ?
if a year prior she did get hit by the car as she was crossing the street she was not lucky to not get hit ! if she did her leg would be broke and she would have a long time healing which would have lead her to not going
if her parents had said not tonight

where do you draw that line or say this was a pivotal moment cause it all is really ?



I have heard this effect simply called LIFE

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I get the idea but every single thing can be tied to this
how far back do you go in timeline ? 2 minutes 10 a hour a day a year ?

My personal opinion is that it has to be that "one thing" that meant the difference in things turning out one way or another.


Take a job interview situation, for example.

You get an education, some experience, get your resume and your cover letter in, land an interview, etc., and all of that put together might lead to a job offer or not. But let's say in your particular case on the day of your interview, you accidentally spill something on your suit that morning. It's your only suit, so you have to reschedule your interview for another day. You later learn that on the day of your interview some terrorists flew a plane into the building where your interview was to take place, killing hundreds of people. Had you been there as you had planned you might have died. The coffee spill is the "butterfly effect." That's a made-up example but there are many "butterfly effect" stories connected to plane crashes, 9/11, etc.

The plane crash that killed Buddy Holly has a couple of butterfly effects: Two people gave up their seats on the plane when asked and survived because they were elsewhere.



To me, the "butterfly effect" is a random occurrence which causes a major event that comes after it to happen differently than was expected.

Merriam-Webster defines it as "...in chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the phenomenon where a small change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere."

I think I'll add that to my first post.

[Doc Safari]

The origin of the butterfly effect:

https://fs.blog/2017/08/the-butterfly-effect/

Ray Bradbury’s classic science fiction story A Sound of Thunder predates the identification of chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Set in 2055, it tells of a man named Eckels who travels back 65 million years to shoot a dinosaur. Warned not to deviate from the tour guide’s plan, Eckels (along with his guide and the guide’s assistant) heads off to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex who was going to die soon anyway when a falling tree lands on it. Eckels panics at the sight of the creature and steps off the path, leaving his guide to kill the T Rex. The guide is enraged and orders Eckels to remove the bullets before the trio returns to 2055. Upon arrival, they are confused to find that the world has changed. Language is altered and an evil dictator is now in charge. A confused Eckels notices a crushed butterfly stuck to his boot and realizes that in stepping off the path, he killed the insect and changed the future. Bradbury writes:

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, “No, it cannot be. Not a little thing like that. No!”

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

“Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!” cried Eckels.

It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?

Bradbury envisioned the passage of time as fragile and liable to be disturbed by minor changes. In the decades since the publication of A Sound of Thunder, physicists have examined its accuracy. Obviously, we cannot time–travel, so there is no way of knowing how plausible the story is, beyond predictive models. Bradbury’s work raises the questions of what time is and whether it is deterministic.

Physicists refer to the Arrow of Time—the non-reversible progression of entropy (disorder.) As time moves forward, matter becomes more and more chaotic and does not spontaneously return to its original state. If you break an egg, it remains broken and cannot spontaneously re-form, for example. The Arrow of Time gives us a sense of past, present, and future. Arthur Eddington (the astronomer and physicist who coined the term) explained:

Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics. This follows at once if our fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of randomness is the only thing which cannot be undone.

In short, the passage of time as we perceive it does exist, conditional to the existence of entropy. As long as entropy is non-reversible, time can be said to exist. The closest thing we have to a true measurement of time is a measurement of entropy. If the progression of time is nothing but a journey towards chaos, it makes sense for small changes to affect the future by amplifying chaos.

Some more thoughts:

“A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation *approximately*. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with *the same approximation*, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.”

— Jules Henri Poincaré (1854–1912)

The rest of the article is interesting as well. It's somewhat "heady" stuff.

[Honu]

My personal opinion is that it has to be that "one thing" that meant the difference in things turning out one way or another.


Take a job interview situation, for example.

You get an education, some experience, get your resume and your cover letter in, land an interview, etc., and all of that put together might lead to a job offer or not. But let's say in your particular case on the day of your interview, you accidentally spill something on your suit that morning. It's your only suit, so you have to reschedule your interview for another day. You later learn that on the day of your interview some terrorists flew a plane into the building where your interview was to take place, killing hundreds of people. Had you been there as you had planned you might have died. The coffee spill is the "butterfly effect." That's a made-up example but there are many "butterfly effect" stories connected to plane crashes, 9/11, etc.

The plane crash that killed Buddy Holly has a couple of butterfly effects: Two people gave up their seats on the plane when asked and survived because they were elsewhere.



To me, the "butterfly effect" is a random occurrence which causes a major event that comes after it to happen differently than was expected.

Merriam-Webster defines it as "...in chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the phenomenon where a small change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere."

I think I'll add that to my first post.

I hear ya I get the fun of the idea so for sure not knocking it please do not read that into it
so its more term of that final chain in events maybe thinking

I still think so many things lead ahhahaah but yeah OK I will go with that then

SO ....... not mine but one of the biggest WOW stories I was told

ironic you said that as example I almost shared this story I kid you not !!! but did not bother because his view was more there was no event BUT what you wrote is a butterfly moment for me to share what I was going to for ya so maybe his event was the final ticket or the deciding that moment to go fix it even though he had not planned on doing that but it was eating him up and he was pissed

so here it is now
I am from Maui I shot weddings and engagements along with other stuff so met a lot of folks all have some kinda WOW stories
had one did stand out and was interesting to hear his viewpoint and how it changed him radically even his new that week wife said yeah I loved em but he has flipped 180 on so many things and is now this total dif mellow person

he has his dads name his dad does not care about paying parking tickets I guess
he just got another parking infraction in his mail and was pissed at his dad and the place issuing for not using the correct address or fixing it time and time again so he was going to work it was eating him up at the last moment he said SCREW this and went to complain in person figuring I will be late in trouble more pissed and so went to get them fixed

now fixed still upset he was like CRAP now I have to go back to work as he was going over some bridge stuck in traffic pissed off again at traffic at going to work at the waste of time he was looking at work about where his floors were from some bridge he was stuck on he could see the building and at that moment he watched a plane fly into the building !!!! exactly where his friends were this was on 9/11
he said it was the most surreal thing ever and could not belive it happened ? and it was this bizarre moment he can't describe but he realized it was real and of course wanted to rush to work but could not as traffic really stood still then but he lost all but a couple of his friends that day as the plane hit the floors he worked in and only his friends that did not go in that day lived
he was like why me ? and he says he will never get pissed off over things anymore
was it I was pissed at my dad ?
was I pissed at the ticket people ?
I lost all my friends that is something to be pissed about ?
was it my dad getting the tickets without them I never would have had a reason to not go in that day what if we never had the same name he ran through every what if he said
so he viewed it more the moment was in reaction to those other events that lead up to it ! he also kept saying what if I never got into this line of work with my friends
what about my friends who I said I can get you a job and they came worked with me are now dead ?
he was so overwhelmed with so many what ifs ?

and he decided none of that could be put on him and he would never look at it that way ever as it was just to much to handle being that close and loosing so much so he just takes each step along the way as what it is no more no less

he was a really nice guy though and his girlfriend to total non NY type folks so he really said never again to get upset at about anything cause its just such a long occurence that leads to other things
granted that was a pretty freaking huge WOW still brings me chicken skin !!!
and this was real I kid you not hands on bible swear on my kids story is true
I remember this was maybe a few months or less after 9/11 ? as that subject was still coming up with every couple as it was so current

forgot how it came up but I think I was like OH you are from NY did what do you think about the 9/11 attack and it was the look of her and him I could tell I was going to get a story and the well .....

[vandal5]

I'm cuddling with a 2yo who doesn't want to go to sleep... I think I can narrow down to the exact "butterfly effect" moment that lead me to be where I am now...

[elephant]

I think its easy to look back and see how your actions played out in your life. A they say: Hindsight is perfect vision! My story is too long but I have witnessed how major setbacks have caused me to do something else that turned out to be better in the long run. I have also made bad decisions because I had few options and how those bad decisions worked out in my favor yet still took a toll on me. I do very much believe that God in truly sovereign and ultimately in charge yet, sometimes, I see reality and have my doubts. I struggle with that.

[Doc Safari]

Yes, Honu, you've got it.
_____________________________________________

I knew a veteran several years ago that missed his chance to deploy to the middle east TWICE.

Once during Desert Storm, and once during the GWOT.

BOTH times, his unit was scheduled to ship out, and inexplicably out of the blue just before deployment he was transferred to another stateside unit.

He told me he never received much of an explananation either time. Both units he missed shipping out with saw combat, but he was stuck in CONUS through both conflicts.

I haven't seen the guy in years, but I remember him telling me that story.
_____________________________________________



Here's one of my favorites. This came from a YouTube video with a bunch of other stories, and it's just a narration so you're not missing much by having me type it instead of just posting the link to the video.

A guy is getting ready to ride with his friends to another town for a Metallica concert. Of course, he's just gotta wear his Metallica T-shirt to the venue. The thing is: he can't find it anywhere. He tears apart his closet, clothes hamper, music collection, chest of drawers--he looks everywhere and just can't find that Metallica T-shirt. In desperation, he decides that "any" rock band T-shirt is better than none when going to a concert, so he puts on his Nirvana T-shirt. He's very self-conscious about it as he meets up with his friends and they travel to the concert.

At the concert, a girl comes up to him and says, "Wow, I think it's really cool you'd wear a Nirvana T-shirt to a Metallica concert!" They hit it off, and he quickly realizes he's going to stay with her and not ride home with his friends. He bids them farewell as they proceed to head home without him.

The next day, he gets a call from the parents of one of his friends. All of them were killed in a car accident on the way home from the concert.

Had he not stayed with the girl, he would have died too. Had he put on his Metallica T-shirt like he intended, he would never have worn the Nirvana shirt and the girl he stayed with would never have approached him.

In the following few days, he was digging through his closet to find the appropriate clothes to wear to the funeral of one of his friends. There, in his closet, exactly where it was supposed to be--was the Metallica T-shirt.