{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2772", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 2772, "subject": "Singleshot: To William", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "2001-08-07T09:38:20+00:00", "last": "2001-08-08T22:50:26+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2001-08-07T09:38:20+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Singleshot: To William", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "This is interesting. When I read the above title, I said to\nmyself, \"No, that's not it. It's 'The Sound of Distant Thunder'.\"\nBut I thought I had better confirm the title before I posted \nanything. And I couldn't. The actual title is \"A Sound of Thunder\" " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "You're right, and you're even approximately right (in footnote) \nabout the source of my confusion, though to me \"the Delicate Sound\nof Thunder\" is a Pink Floyd live album -- didn't know there was a\nrelated concert film." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "What makes it interesting is that it seems that Dan'l* and I are not \nthe only ones who misremember the title slightly. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I'd almost bet that it's appeared under variant titles. I _know_\nthat \"distant\" is in there somewhere 8*)" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "... Apparently Hollywood is thinking of turning \"Thunder\" into\na film, which raises some questions: Will the film get made?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "In Hollywood that's always a big question." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "If it does, will it bear as little resemblance to the original\nstory as _Total Recall_ did to the Philip K. Dick story \"We Can\nRemember It For You Wholesale\" that it was based on? " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Dunno. I'd keep in mind that Bradbury \n\t(a) has had better luck in this regard (viz. _Fahrenheit \n\t 451_, etc.) \n\t(b) has, unlike PKD, a Hollywood \"rep\" (through his own \n\t film work), and \n\t(c) is regarded as a \"real writer\" by the Dreaded Bicoastal\n\t Litererary Establishment." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Will any of us care either way?)" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Some of us, yes." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Anyway, here's the flaw. If you kill a mouse or any other animal**\nin the past, you will wipe out all of its descendents, perhaps\nmany billions of mice, if you are far enough back in time. But\nwill this cause an avalanche of changes to thunder down the\ncorridors of time? I don't think so. More of the descendants of\nall of the other contemporaneous mice will live and the mouse\npopulation will will be virtually (or even absolutely) unchanged,\nso the mouse predators and those who prey on them will see no\ndifference. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "So far so good. But.\n\nFirst of all, we're talking a little longer ago than mice. But let\nthat pass; let us assume that we're talking about the small mammals,\nsome of them pretty mouse-like, that existed contemporaneously with\nthe later Age of Reptiles.\n\nWe really don't know much about them. Let's assume for convenience\nthat the population was actually pretty large, so your argument \nabout mice being interchangeable has some validity. \n\nBut only some. In fact, comes the Yucatan Smash, the population of\nthese whatever-they-are's is going to be greatly reduced in a very\nshort time. Did you kill the ancestor of one of the survivors? If\nso, then you've significantly changed the genepool with which the\nlocal area will begin when that big meteor hits the Restart button.\nIn fact, even if you didn't, by removing one competitor for resources\nand its descendants, you've rearranged the pattern by which other\ncritters disperse and gather -- some other little mammal will eat the\nstuff your mamal didn't, and so be somewhere else at a certain time;\nmatings will change; etc. A somewhat-different set of cute li'l\nmammals will be in the right places to survive when the hammer falls.\nWhich means a somewhat-different set of genes to start evolving into\nthe Age Of Mammals[tm].\n\nHell, there are birds back then, too. Though I admit it's unproven,\nchances are that some of them eat those mousey things. \n\nI repeat: what you are dismissing as the \"crushed butterfly\" theory\nis just the _fact_ that actions have consequences, and the consequences\nare unpredictable.\n\nNo. There is no guarantee that killing that butterfly in 6,000,000 \nBC will cause Dan Quayle to be elected President in 1996. But \nthere's no guarantee that it _won't_. The Earth is a chaotic system,\nmeaning \"unpredictable sensitivity to starting conditions,\" where\n\"starting\" means \"whenever you decide to start monitoring.\" History\n_may_ be conserved. Or it may not be.\n\nAnd the greater the change, the less likely it seems that history \nwill be conserved. Kill the young Hitler and WW2 (including some \nform of anti-Semitic pogroms) will probably still happen, though \nsomewhat differently. Maybe there will even still be some sort of\nHolocaust, and things will look fairly similar in 1945. \n\n(On the other hand, a somewhat-saner Fuhrer might fund research \nthat leads to the discovery of the Bomb by Germany [or, who was \nit that wrote a story in which the Germans didn't get the bomb but\nfigured out how to use radioactive dust as a weapon of terror?\nAnyway...], or have the sense not to attack Russia and Britain and\ncertainly not to attack both.)\n\nBut even if they look fairly similar in '45, will they look that\nsimilar in '95? What difference will it make if Anne Frank is \ncaptured earlier and her diary never discovered? What difference will \nit make if Niemoller never makes his famous statement about \"when \nthey came for so-and-so\"? What difference will it make if the Jews \n[and Gypsies and homosexuals and anyone else the Nazis don't like] \nare only imprisoned and mistreated but not systematically gassed?\n\nI suspect the answers are \"very little, fairly little, and a great\ndeal.\" But I don't know. And I certainly don't know about 2195; \nperhaps the Diary of Anne Frank will yet inspire a world-changing\nreligious movement. (What if the Catholic Church were to take it \ninto its collective heads to canonize her as a martyr? It is not,\nactually, inconceivable.)\n\nThe problem is that you're thinking of \"crushed butterfly\" as an\nabsolute; it isn't. It allows for the likelyhood that _some_ \nchanges will leave history pretty much unchanged. (A hawk was\ngoing to kill that mouse in ten minutes anyway, and that particular\nhawk is actually quite well-fed, so its life is unaffected by missing\nthis one meal.)\n\nAnd, of course, there's the third theory, which nobody seems to\nhave mentioned but which Wolfe (who is, after all, the nominal \ntopic of this list and so has to be mentioned now and then, somehow) \nseems to subscribe to in all his timetravelling, or at least in the \nLupiverse -- that if you travel back in time, you can't really change \nanything, because what you're doing back there you already did back \nthere because if you hadn't you wouldn't be here to go back there \nand do it. Or something like that. (Except for the whole business\nabout earlier versions of Severian, which seem to imply that maybe\nit is possible in the Lupiverse-of-discourse to change history, but \nlet's not get into that, for purposes of _this_ discussion.)" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "History will be conserved***, but at least some of the\nindividuals involved will be different and the details will\nvery probably be different as well!" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I tend to think history is mostly details. Archimedes getting\nkilled because some soldier didn't recognize him (or didn't\nfollow orders), that sort of thing. " }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "So, Pullman's alternate world which is so completely different from \nours in so many ways but still has a recognizable Oxford in it and a \nJohn Calvin, still in a prominent, church-related role, strikes me as \nbeing just plain silly." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "With that, I agree. And to me it is a significant flaw in the book.\n\n--Dan'l" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "William Ansley", "address": "wansley at warwick.net" }, "date": "2001-08-08T22:50:26+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Singleshot: To William", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 9:38 AM -0700 8/7/01, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:\nFirst of all, we're talking a little longer ago than mice. But let\nthat pass; let us assume that we're talking about the small mammals,\nsome of them pretty mouse-like, that existed contemporaneously with\nthe later Age of Reptiles." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I could address some of your other comments in your reply to me and I \nmay do so later, but I feel I have to address your implication that \neither I or Ray Bradbury believe that mice were contemporaneous with \ndinosaurs.\n\nI am sorry if my previous message was confusing. In it I quoted from \nan article about a possible movie based on Ray Bradbury's story \"The \nSound of Thunder.\" The passage from the article I quoted was mostly a \nquotation from the story itself. So the stuff about mice was by \nBradbury. It was part of a lecture given to the time travellers \nbefore they set off on their dinosaur hunt to explain why it was so \nvitally important that they stay on the path (a metal walkway \nlevitating over the surface of the ground). The butterfly didn't get \ncrushed until quite a bit later in the story and wasn't discovered \nuntil the end.\n\nSo Bradbury didn't think mice were contemporaneous with dinosaurs, \neven if my clumsy juxtaposition of passages from different places in \nhis story made it seem as if he did. And I was just addressing \nBradbury's text." }, { "kind": "sig", "depth": 0, "text": "William Ansley" } ] } ] }