Do you think The Multiverse exists...

...and what do you think of the potential ramifications if it does or does not?

This started off in the Transhuman post and I wondered about what other tropers thought of it. Now I just want to hear your two cents on the topic.

edited 29th Mar '11 6:11:51 PM by Ekuran

Probably. If so, sweet.

My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.

I'm unaware of any evidence for or against the existence of the multiverse. My default attitude towards such ideas is tentative disbelief. I hope the multiverse does not exist.

Well, I certainly don't know. But I think it would be very bad it existed. [1]

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

No, but it would be cool.

^^Multiple-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, duh.

edited 29th Mar '11 7:03:06 PM by Myrmidon

Kill all math nerds

By multiverse, do you mean what Douglas Adams calls the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash?

As all in the infinite universes considered as one?

EDIT: Yes. I believe that anything that is possible occurs in an infinite amount of universes somewhere, even if this universe is not one of them.

edited 29th Mar '11 7:30:42 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

Not really, but it's on my list of things I wouldn't be that surprised if it did. Physics has kind of jaded me to weird shit out of left field

edited 29th Mar '11 7:28:22 PM by Pykrete

There's an independent work out there that's set in a universe capable of connecting to any other. If the universe itself weren't a Death World, I'd probably want to visit just so I can meet some of the characters.

Why I am afraid of fences.

I have a theory on that. In an infinite existence, it's safe to say that universe is connected to an infinite # universes of infinite variability, but not our universe.

How? Because we're on a different infinite set of infinity.

I though this up when watching Doctor Who and wondering how Davros could destroy REALITY ITSELF, obviously succeeding somewhere in the Multiverse, but we're all still here.

edited 29th Mar '11 7:51:53 PM by Ekuran

I'm not sure one way or the other whether it does or does not exist, but I jokingly like to think of the world as an All the Myriad Ways kind of thing. I like to think of how situations could have gone if things had been different. "What if that car in front of me had slammed on their brakes?" "What if I gave into the urge and hurled my phone across this parking lot?" "What if I never played Saga Frontier?"

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

It can be depressing to think that if you succeeded at something, you still failed in another universe. The original All the Myriad Ways managed to argue that proving such a thing would lead to the collapse of society. Mind you, there are potentially ways around this . . . (Unless, of course, you believe that all versions of yourself share a single soul, in which case you run into other problems.)

Sci-fi has really done this to death, hasn't it?

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

While it's true that if I won in this universe, I lost in another, I'm not aware of what the other me is doing. I think where the original story broke down was assuming that people would commit crimes because "Well, somewhere I didn't." I suppose a few would, but I think those are the people who're just looking for an excuse. Those same people would probably just as likely go on said crime spree because "well, someone was gonna steal it, may as well be me" if you told them ahead of time

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

• Into this wilde Abyss,
• The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
• Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
• But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
• Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
• Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
• His dark materials to create more Worlds,
• Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
• Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
• Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
• He had to cross.

edited 30th Mar '11 12:58:41 AM by Mullerornis

A single phrase renders Christianity a delusional cult.

No idea. I hope it does.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

It's seems preferable to having it the other way around.

Well, I DID like the idea of a multiverse until Love Happiness's post. Infinite suffering is certainly sobering.

However, unless conservation of energy turns out to be complete bunk, we can only ever concieve of these alternate universes, and not interact with them. It would be like characters in one book contemplating the plight of those in another (or, since most alternate universes are likely uninhabited, contemplating unwritten or unfinished books).. It can get you down, but there's no way to actually access that universe, so ultimately it doesn't affect us. And even if we can't change our past (for the same reasons we can't go to other universes) we still have the present and future to look forward to, and it makes them even more relevant.

Bottomline: we can't effect the suffering in other universes, but maybe we can learn from them. Somehow.

Well, infinite suffering + infinite happieness = exact middle of the sliding scale.

And if "fictional" characters can go to other universes, I highly doubt we can't either (or at least wait for them to come here). This is The Multiverse here. Infinite possiblity = awesome.

The multiverse is a bit of an undefined theory, since it arises from different physical theories. We have the many-world intepretation of quantum-mechanics, which is really just speculation. It might be true, but the Copenhagen intepretation seems just as likely. And there is no particular way to test whether one or the other is true. M-theory gives us another one (or so I'm told, unlike QM I have absolutely no idea what M-theory actually entails). The problem with most postulates of multiverses, in physics at least, is that there is no connection between the two, which means that there is no possible way to design an experiment which would reveal it's existence or non-existence. Which is why some people argue that it's an unscientific claim. The only way to do some kind of test on it would be if the following is the case. H1 is a hypothesis. This hypothesis implies with absolute logical certainty that the consequence C1 (the existence of a multiverse) must be true. Now this theory have other consequences C2, C3 etc. that can be tested, which then turn out to be true or false. If one of them is false, H1 is falsified and we can also falsify the consequence C1. If they are true we have not verified H1 (since we can't test C1 and since we can only say that it hasn't been falsfied anyways, since the implication only goes one way), it would however imply that H1 and C1 is true.

edited 30th Mar '11 7:17:00 AM by Mathias

Technically, Cross Overs involve writing a separate, third setting in which two unrelated settings are combined. The alternative is that they are already considered to be in the same setting, much like if we were to meet aliens in the future, they were just there all along. As a rule of thumb, anytime you need to make concessions to one or more settings to fit them together, you're essentially writing a whole new setting that happens to share elements of continuity. In other words, another alternate universe.

What about Sliders?

But in all honesty, I think you mean a limited multiverse that has a consistent set of rules or beings, like the Marvel and DC universes. Then I think I'm speaking about the Omniverse then.

edited 30th Mar '11 8:06:30 AM by Ekuran

Then again, if you failed at something here, some other version of you did something ridiculously awesome and it worked.

The multiverse may exist as part of making the math work out, but it will never be accessible. If it were accessible, we'd just expand the scale of the "universe."

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Some of me believe in it, others do not.

Trump delenda est

isn't the afterlife part of the multiverse?

Place your past in a book burn the pages let them cook.

Technically. If you believe in the multiverse then you see the afterlives as other universes that your "soul" is somehow intrinsically attached to, held back only by being even more intrinsically attached to the body of this universe.

I personally believe that there is a multiverse. I mean, it's most likely possible and it's fun to imagine that on some other frequency you're another sex, or you're rich and powerful, or you were born in the Marvel universe, or something to that effect.

I've also had this crazy theory that fiction in our world is us simply recalling major or key events that occur to certain people in other universes and they reason why characters can be so flat or worlds so underdeveloped is because our recall of these other worlds suck.

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