And, there’s both sides of the butterfly effect theory. The one side is that tiny changes can ripple through the world and have a massive effect. The other side is that seemingly big changes sometimes don’t have much of an effect at all.

If you’re a time traveller and you go back in time, you know that there might be a very small number of possible futures where you exist. An even smaller number of futures where you’re a scientist. An even smaller number of futures where you’re a scientist who figures out how to build a time machine. And so-on. So, you don’t want to risk any disruptions that might negatively effect the world that you know.

At the same time, in the present, it’s hard to know what to do. Big protest movements often have minimal impact. The things that do have an impact are impossible to predict: something unexpected happens while a reporter (or these days a big influencer) happens to be filming, and something about it goes viral.

If you don’t want things to change, you don’t touch anything because even a small change could have huge consequences. If you do want things to change, it’s hard to know what to do because even a big change often seems to have few consequences.