Dear reader, have you ever stopped to think about how many things had to go right in order for you to be sitting here reading these words? How much had to go wrong? How many ancestors had to narrowly avoid death, had to find each other across famines and floods, wander across wars and wastelands? How many tragedies and missteps had to place them at specific points in space and time, a map of possibilities? Is there any order to the madness that made you?

When pondering the potentiality, it’s hard not to wonder whether all we are is owed to chaos. In a sense it is; according to Merriam-Webster, one definition of chaos is “the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.” In this understanding, chaos is the womb from which all life in the universe was born. It also refers to the apparent unpredictability of behavior of said life within complex natural systems, such as here on Earth.

The study of this unpredictability within systems governed by set laws is called chaos theory. At its core is a paradox: the subject is randomness, and yet the context is deterministic. For example, the trajectory of a molecule may be unpredictable, but it still operates within the unbending rules of physics and nature. We may be free to move any which way, but we are still subject to gravity. In other words, chaos exists within order, two sides of the same coin.

Physics itself is deterministic. Theoretically, understanding all of the laws that govern a system (such as our planet) should mean that we are able to predict every aspect of its future. And yet we can’t; even the weather changes on us. Mathematician Edward Lorenz learned this while studying weather models on an early computer. Each time he ran the simulation, he used the same inputs and machine, and yet he got vastly different results. What he discovered was that the system he was studying was extremely sensitive: a rounding error as small as one part in a million could change the result. He later described this discovery as the butterfly effect.

We live in chaotic times. Senseless horrors flood our screens. Our timelines are populated both by people we are lucky enough to know and those we will most likely never meet, all offering more disparate information than we could ever disentangle. How can we hope to make sense of anything when everything is at our fingertips? The more common definition of chaos is a state of confusion, which is apt for our world today. The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once captured this perfectly: the meaninglessness of modern life, punctuated by moments of clarity.

At the same time, it’s easy to have a deterministic mindset about our world and its future. We assume that the forces that govern our societies—the powers that be—are impossible to overcome. But chaos theory reminds us that even the smallest particle change can disrupt a projected outcome. The sensitivity of all chaotic systems means that we can never fully predict the trajectories they will take. A butterfly flapping its wings could be the start of a revolution. 

It’s unlikely that any of us should be here, and yet we are. It’s unlikely that we should fall in love, and yet we do. I can’t tell you if we have pandemonium to thank: if it’s entirely random or fixed by fate, part of some grand determinism that’s impossible for us to fathom. People find comfort in the notion that everything happens for a reason. Maybe it does. Maybe it’s more precious, more devastating for all of it to be improbable and strange—the chaos of dancing stars.