This is the idea that if something changes in the past, it will have little to no effect on the present day,
"The universe doesn't much care if you step on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies."
This idea is explored throughout the Terminator trilogy, where the events of the second film of destroying Cyberdyne have no change on the robot uprising/Armageddon of the Terminator 3 ending.
Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" published in 1952 explores the idea of the effects of extreme time travel, going back 65 million years and stepping on a butterfly, the effects of which are pretty limited, humans still evolve as normal, America is still founded, and English is still spoke, the only difference being that people can't spell, and a fascist government are elected. Relating back to the parody of this story in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror V, where although the present changes dramatically, there is always a Simpsons family who always live in the same house.
An episode of Family Guy called Road to the Multiverse plays on the multiverse theory, each universe only having minor changes in history, and although the realities are much different in terms of culture, technology and science, Quahog is always the center of the story, with all the main characters still around and still fulfilling their characters roles as normal. There is one exception where the ice age never happened, and the world is presently in an ice age, where the and the town is replaced with a glacier.
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