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The butterfly effect is a term that describes a situation where a time traveler, by performing minor actions in the past, radically changes the future. The term was coined by Ray Bradbury's short story “And the Thunder Broke,” in which a time traveler goes back in time and steps on a butterfly, dramatically changing the present.
To be honest, this idea seems too far-fetched to me. Bradbury warned in his story about the danger of interfering in the affairs of the past, but in my opinion he is slightly exaggerating. The fact is that there is an opinion that the past is like a house of cards: each event is important and must occur at a certain time with an accuracy of milliseconds. I admit that in this case, the butterfly effect makes sense, but with this arrangement of the world, time travel should immediately cause a time collapse, because the very fact of being in the past is not provided, and what if the traveler breathed the oxygen that another person should have breathed, it will change everything. As you can see, living in such a world is quite scary. However, I believe that our past is more flexible and there are events that allow for some variability. For example: you are standing at a bus stop and waiting for a bus, does it really matter if you wait 5 minutes or 10? I agree that this is important if you are late for a train or an important meeting, but these are rare exceptional events. In most cases, a certain margin of error is allowed. It's also about the properties of the human psyche: we want to blame something. The same example with the bus: it arrived 10 minutes late and we missed the train, and then it starts “all because of the bus, it would have ruined my life if it hadn't been for him”. But this is not so, if you really needed to be on time, then you should have left early.
I personally believe that it is not possible to accurately determine the importance of an event for the past. We can't calculate the exact consequences of our actions in the past, so it's very dangerous to change history.