Complete Chaos:

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ENTRY #1

A hurricane triggered by a butterfly’s wings. The start to chaos theory. Entropy. Unrealized realities. The big picture! I think Harlan Ellison has it pegged when he says there is no such thing as chance, only patterns we cannot understand.

We, as humans, are so caught up in our day-to-day life--what to make for dinner, how will I fix this error, will I keep my job, the baby is crying--that it’s insanely difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture.

Let me tell you something, folks, everything is connected. And I do mean everything! Here’s a tangible example: Most of us have spent time in a traffic jam. We cannot see the accident ahead, all we're focused on is the fact that 65 mph traffic has just come to a standstill. What the hell, we think! I have places to be! Things to do!

Watch people in a traffic jam. They cannot see the connection they have to the accident ahead and they get very agitated! And the resulting frustration from that first accident might lead someone a mile back to become distracted and rear-end the car in front of him.

Did the first accident cause the second? Did the driver simply cause it in carelessness? Would this have even happened if the guy had left work five minutes earlier? Or would something worse have happened?

This is chaos theory. A pattern so large and so intricate that the best we can see are some of the smallest gears in the machine. Some say that everything happens for a reason. Do we ever really know what that reason is?

One day I was riding public transit home from work and the bus I was on broke down. I was a little frustrated; it had been a long day and I wanted to get home to my wife. But then I started wondering, what if this breakdown was the universe's way of keeping me from a greater harm? I would never know because that horrible event wouldn’t happen.

In Connie Willis’ book “To Say Nothing of the Dog,” time travelers go back to the Victorian Era hoping to correct an inconsistency, but instead create a larger one. But they have incorporated Chaos Theory into their studies. "The continuum has a way of correcting itself," they often say. Even if we could go back and change things, it doesn't mean that our desired outcome would be produced when we return to our present. There are too many other factors involved to allow us to change one single thing and not change everything. Look also at _Farscape_, formerly of the SciFi Channel. John Crichton was given the ability to navigate wormholes. Wormholes can navigate both time and space respectively, but careless travel can create unrealized realities.

If a traveler appears earlier in his own timeline, the result is like a pebble cast upon a still ocean. The waves radiate outward over time, altering events at almost an exponential scale. So when the traveler returns to his own time, he finds that thousands if not millions of decisions have changed because of that one alteration.

If one could possibly comprehend the big picture in the grand scheme of time travel and the universe, he might be able to affect his idea of change. But on a smaller scale, we need to keep in mind there is a big picture and we are but a small part of it.

-Taylor Nelson, Sunnyvale, California