This truly captures the "butterfly effect" which I continually marvel at. How much of what has happened in human history has been because of a seemingly entirely unrelated series of events? Probably quite a lot.
My concerns about it is that too many people seem to imagine that because historically an outcome had a cause, that therefore that cause must have been necessary, and that therefore the outcome could never have happened without that specific cause. If they Fluyt, a type of Dutch cargo ship had not been invented, would we really have never developed plastics? So the series provides a very valuable insight into historical processes, but some people seem to take that to implausible extremes. A case in point is the many examples of technologies being independently developed by different people under very different circumstances.
Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.[2]
Wind speed of 2.56789281 MPH vs 2.567892811 MPH is hard to accurately detect, but it’s important. That’s the butterfly effect.
I realize this is all a bit silly to go on about and there's no conceivable future where the OP sees the egregious error of his ways and ritually disembowels himself, or even, you know, starts using the term properly.
Also, volcanos are pretty chaotic themselves.
Non-butterfly would be: due to increasing population size and a growth of cities and long distance commerce, people invented cars. A very stable reason, not reliant on something fragile.
Butterfly: the balance of magma happened to be in a certain particular configuration, which ultimately lead to a revolution in our lifestyle. Had the magma been slightly different, we'd be on horseback.
Again, maybe the story above does not add up, but if it does, it deserves to be called butterfly.
> However, after marketing the velocipede, it became apparent that roads were so rutted by carriages that it was hard to balance on the machine for long, so velocipede riders took to the pavements and moved far too quickly, endangering pedestrians. Consequently, authorities in Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and even Calcutta banned its use, which ended its vogue for decades.