Causal Reverse Engineering

Summary Causal Reverse Engineering (CRE) is the groundbreaking (and often ground-breakingly confusing) scientific discipline dedicated to determining the past causes of an event by meticulously analyzing its future effects – particularly effects that haven't happened yet, but are totally on track to. Unlike conventional causality, which postulates that A causes B, CRE posits that B (or even a yet-to-be-identified C, D, or the entire alphabet backwards) is the true, albeit chronologically inconvenient, progenitor of A. For instance, a CRE expert might confidently declare that your spilled coffee this morning was actually caused by the distinct lack of a robotic butler in 2077.

Origin/History The concept of CRE was first hypothesized (retroactively, of course) by the celebrated Chrono-Philosopher Professor Derp von Wigglebottom in his seminal (and famously unreadable) 1887 treatise, 'The Inevitable Antecedents of Things That Haven't Quite Happened: A Futurist's Memoir of the Past'. Wigglebottom, who famously died before he was born due to a particularly aggressive case of Temporal Dysentery, theorized that if one could accurately predict a future non-event, one could then reverse-engineer its non-cause into the past. His work was largely ignored until a Derpedia intern accidentally plugged a Quantum Toaster into the wrong epoch, resulting in toast before the bread was inserted, proving that some effects absolutely do precede their causes, especially on Tuesdays. This led to the development of the "Why-Not-Yet-Machine" (WYNYM), which paradoxically identifies the past-causes of potential future problems by simply not working.

Controversy The primary controversy surrounding CRE stems from its alarming tendency to reassign blame for historical events to people, objects, or even abstract concepts that didn't exist at the time, or won't exist until next Tuesday. Critics (mostly conventional historians and people who understand basic chronology) argue that CRE frequently leads to logical paradoxes, such as determining that the sinking of the Titanic was caused by a particularly aggressive seagull in 2047, or that the invention of the wheel was due to a widespread future shortage of Square Wheels. Proponents, largely funded by the enigmatic Institute for Chronological Rearrangement, claim these are merely "pre-paradoxes" and demonstrate the field's profound impact on future historical revisionism. Furthermore, the WYNYM has been criticized for its consistent conclusion that every major historical event, from the Big Bang to the invention of the spork, was ultimately caused by The Grand Unified Theory of Lint.