Most of us here are familiar with the phrase the butterfly effect. In fact many may have had the fortune/misfortune of seeing a movie named after it. In a nutshell, it is a scientific theory that a single occurrence, no matter how small, can change the courses of the universe forever. The idea is that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.
One more well-known, documented example is that when U.S. President Gerald Ford fell down the stairs of Air Force One in 1975, it culminated in the current financial crisis. You did not know about that before, did you? Now we can cut the people we have been blaming some slack. A new theory suggests that a blue Morpho butterfly in the backyard of the royal palace tilted more to the right while flapping her wings going on her daily flight around the palace.
Butterflies themselves might be actually the key to averting future disasters. I was eating seeds and it occurred to me: the solution to all world’s problems. The next few days I spent in solitude formulating my hypothesis and drawing conclusions from previous similar incidents that involved some statistics.
With the help of urbandictionary.com, a few computational software programs and some scientific inquisitiveness, I worked to discover the solution to not just the financial crisis but I included other looming dangers: global warming, illegal underage human trafficking, racism and the “Twilight” saga movies.
The solution to combating all those threats lay silently hidden in the popular phrase the “butterfly effect.”
Did you also know that the butterfly effect affects your everyday life? The butterfly effect can explain why I hit my head yesterday and why I aced that physics test. It can also explain lots of the things happening in our lives. Unfortunately, no scientist can explain these events. The theory can, but it is so incredibly big and complex that it cannot be represented by any model or equation.
On the other hand, the solution I came up with to solve all world problems is very simple. We need to exterminate butterflies all immediately and avert any more disasters caused by them. Ridding the nation and eventually the whole world of all the butterflies will save humanity from their devastating effects. We are fooled by their vivid, distinctive colors and are amazed by their beauty. Their pretty wings have been hiding the truth for millions of years now. Only with modern statistical techniques have we been able to uncover the secret, the one that can really matter, not the old bestselling secret of the law of attraction.
We can basically avert the looming climate crisis and possibly even mend the current financial one by eliminating butterflies. Just put two and two together. By eliminating the butterflies, we would be stopping any crisis the butterflies could play a role in, as middlemen, or middle-insects to be more precise.
There is no estimate of how many lives we could save. I would leave that for other scientists to work on. I wanted to submit my theory and proposal to the Copenhagen Climate Summit committee for review last year, but I was late in finalizing my results. I would have to wait for the next big international summit on global crisis. (It would not be long with the rate of disasters happening this year.)
But then, maybe the butterflies are all conspiring to prevent me from publishing my words. If you are one of the lucky ones who read this article, you have to thank a butterfly for flying in its usual path without disturbing Ford.
Special note to self: Before eliminating all the butterflies, find a few to keep in our natural history museums.
Abdallah Abu Ghazaleh is a freshman majoring in electrical engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].