What if we knew everything?

The question I'd like to think about today is "What would history look like if we knew everything about the past?" To answer that question, we have to start from the basics. What does it mean to 'know everything about the past'? In the study of history, there are two main components: the events themselves, and the cause and effect relations between the events. In the modern conception of history, having the events on their own isn't really that interesting: we need those causes and effects. However, when we think about knowing all of history, we generally are talking about knowing all the events, rather than all the cause and effect relationships. Trying to find all those cause and effect relationships is generally left to science. On the other hand, if we really knew all the events of the past, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to create some theories for some of the causal relationships, due to the vast quantity of data at our disposal. But back to the point, we have to choose if we only know all the events, or if we know both the events and the causal relationships. On a whim, I pick the former. That direction seems like it would me more interesting. So, lets say that we know all the events of the past. What would our history look like? If we were to stick to the contemporary method of drawing narratives from that history, we might be at a little bit of a loss for what to do. We'd have so much information, but our narrative couldn't be infinitely long. That would be quite the pain to read. So we would have to excise some bits. But what information should we excise, and what should we keep? Its pretty difficult to know the extent to which minor changes would effect the course of history. If we compared a world in which in the middle of the amazon rainforest a butterfly flaps its wings to another in which the butterfly suddenly ceases to exist, when would the histories diverge? Would they even diverge? Maybe the butterfly is so inconsequential that the events of history would basically be the same without it. Maybe there are actually overpowering forces that would cause similar events to happen even if there were a greater difference in the two worlds. What if in one world Hitler ceases to exist? Would WWII still take place? The answers to any of these questions are pretty much unknowable. We'd have to conduct an experiment, but we can't because we are only given this one world to test in. Anyways, the extent to which one minor event will change another further down the line will determine the breath of the narrative we create. If the butterfly's existence doesn't matter, great, but if it does... we're going to need one heck of a thick book. Any narrative we create necessarily includes those cause and effect relationships between the lines (a topic which I have beaten to death in previous blog posts), but rather than finding new causal relationships like we do in science, we fit the ones that make sense onto history. The instant we ask a question that is vaguely interesting, such as 'why did Caligula go mad?' we move past the events themselves and into the realm of causality. If we know (because we know everything) that Caligula had a lot of led in his blood when he died, we can apply our current causal relationship knowledge about led poisoning and madness to that situation and claim that led poisoning is why Caligula went mad. This is the bright side of infinite knowledge of the past: questions like these could be much more easily answered. Maybe that is really what history is about, its about the small questions, but we content ourselves with narratives because we are highly self conscious about our own inadequacy to answer even the smallest of questions. That is not to say, though, that I know if creating a narrative of history would be significantly harder with infinite knowledge of the past. Maybe it would be easy as pie, but I wouldn't and couldn't know, because I unfortunately don't have infinite knowledge of the past.