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Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

What horrors? Our sun is already one of 100 billion in the Milky Way, and our galaxy one of (is it?) 1 trillion in the 13-billion-year-old observable Universe. It's only a small step to accept our observable Universe is only one of 10 trillion bubbles in the Multiverse.

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The fact that the apparent randomness seen in quantum mechanics is actually our traveling down one of many possibilities, each of which manifest of their own right. Which means that, if I reach success in my life, thinking back to the hopeful sorry self in my past, I can no longer say, "to think, that sorry guy became the success he is today". That sorry guy also died of cancer, fell off a cliff, died alone, became a heroin addict, and won the lottery. It means that if we as a race ever successfully end poverty or oppression, there will be infinite other amount of scenarios where it never happened and probably got worse. I could imagine all sorts of horrible possibilities but I won't.

I'm just going off of what other people seem to conclude from this theory. I admit it seems a bit juvenile that every conceivable thing is possible. ("Everything you can think of is true" - Tom Waits) There's probably a lot of physical limitations. But I still worry what sorts of horrible scenarios it may allow for.

But, I dunno, maybe not all multiple universe theories are the same.

I have a wild and semi-unprovable theory that whenever you feel fear in a life-threatening situation, you are in fact feeling the simultaneous multiple-universe death of your other selves who don't survive the life-threatening situation -- sort of the way identical twins report that they can sense each other's feelings, or know when the other is in danger. It's probably total BS, but it's fun to think about.

I think it's cool too, since every possibility has a non-zero probability of occurring, so I can attempt absolutely anything I want, no matter how crazy, and somewhere I will have succeeded. I don't even have to put in any effort.

Of course, if the set of possibly horrible things is much larger than that of possibly great things, then yes reality sucks. Given that there are always many more ways things can go wrong than right, I guess reality sucks.

So, the end result is I don't even have to do anything and my dreams come true, but that doesn't matter because so do my nightmares, and there are more of them.

>I think it's cool too, since every possibility has a non-zero probability of occurring

So, in some universe there is no extent multiverse?

Not every thing that appears possible is.

Physically speaking.

Well there's that stupid beard that Spock wears, for one.

am I the only one always quite surprised that the universe is 'only' 13 billion years old?

That always struck me as odd too, since the Earth itself is ~4.5 billion years old. It just seems odd that our little planet has been around (in some fashion) for a significant portion of the lifetime of the universe.

In addition to that, our solar system probably formed from the remains of one or more second-generation stars, so our planet has already been around longer than at least one of its "ancestors".

I believe Hindu cosmologies put our universe's lifespan on the order of trillions of years.

It's turtles all the way down...

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