Butterfly effect?
When I was young, I read a lot of science fiction novels punctuated with classic and contemporary lit. I had always been fascinated by whatever information I could get about space and spent a lot of time looking at the pages in our old atlas (which I have here at the Landfill) that depicted the planets and some of the other stuff in our solar system and loved thinking about the possibilities of far distant planets.
That was when I was old enough to know that humans had not actually traveled to the moon yet. After all, I had seen it on TV (cartoons) many times (the moon has lots of craters, don’tcha know) and I had no reason to believe that we hadn’t been there. I don’t remember when or where that defining moment occurred but I do *remember* it. Much later in my life, I watched someone walk on the moon’s surface. I was watching it with all the [beloved] cool kids 😎 at the Piedy cabin and I was hiding the fact that I was “deathly ill” with a sore throat and fever. Oh, I was okay, it was just the onset of a summer cold.
At some point, I read a book where somebody went back in time for some reason I can’t remember. Before this person time traveled, there was a nasty presidential campaign going on with a “good guy” and a “bad guy” facing off against each other. When the time traveler set off, the “good guy” was favored to win the election. The time traveler was advised not to go and cautioned that, if he did, not to disturb *anything*. Alas, the time traveler was walking on some sort of trail somewhere and managed to step off of it and step on a butterfly.
The time traveler managed to return to whatever century he had come from. Alas, he found that the “bad guy” had won the election.
I’m not [exactly 🐽] trying to relate this story to the outcome of our recent election. If you know me, you know I am not a Trump supporter in any way, shape, or form. My *personal* opinion is that he is not fit to preside over our nation. But I don’t want to dwell on that tonight.
Does anyone out there remember that scifi book or story or whatever?
Down here on the Planet Ann Arbor, as I was writing this earlier, my Mouse came over and we all walked over to our neighborhood pub/steakhouse for dinner. We ate at the bar. It was soooo much fun. The guy sitting next to @tmotu has had hand stuff done by our fave Doc Lien and, on the other side of Mouse was a service member (staff seargent) who was at Knight’s for the first time to have an Old Fashioned. Bartender Yul Mike served us all. I’m pretty sure we are not all in alignment in terms of politics but we were all able to talk to each other tonight. <3
December 7th, 2016 at 10:30 pm
Ray Bradbury. “A Sound of Thunder.” Story had a profound effect on me, too. But I did have to look up the name.
December 9th, 2016 at 10:48 pm
There is a movie by that name, but it doesn’t involve a butterfly, as far as I can remember. I love time travel stuff; it really makes me think!