Burning Down Hilbert’s Hotel
"A screen capture from Riven. A great game about multiverses." src=
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There’s an idea that’s been plaguing me for a number of years
since I read Max Tegmark’s article in Scientific American. What if
there are infinitely many universes that have existed for all
eternity? Doesn’t that imply that everything is ultimately
meaningless? From a human perspective, I mean.
Think about it. If all Hubble volumes are subject to Poincare’s
Recurrence Theorem and we have an endless amount of time, that
means all posssible arrangements of particles in a universe, no
matter how unlikely, are repeated exactly infinitely many
times. That means there infinitely many exact duplicates of you
reading this post scattered across all infinity and enternity. On
the grandest scale, you never really die, you never really change
and all decisions don’t matter.
So how do you write a gripping story in a universe like that?
Larry Niven mentioned this problem in his story, “All the Myriad
Ways.” Of course he was only positing a very large, but always
growning, number of universes. With infinity and eternity, the
problem only gets worse.
The problem for science fiction authors is that you have to
posit some kind of threat, some kind of conflict, even if it’s just
a mental one, for the protagonists to overcome. There has to be
some kind of change. But, if for example, Pace exists, in infinite
duplication, over the infinity of space and time. I can’t die.
Nothing really threatens me because all decisions and ramifications
happen all possible ways. There are inifinite number of dead mes,
an infinite number of live mes.
At this point we have to define what I am. I’ll posit here that
any person from any hubble volume that has my exact same genetic
code is a version of me. This rules out possibilites like an Inuit
or Yoruba Pace-likes. Those Pace-likes would have at least a slight
variations in genetic code. This also rules out female Pace-likes
or Pace-likes with genetic diseases. However it doesn’t rule out
some types of homosexual Pace-likes. Homosexuality is biologically
caused but in many cases it is not genetically caused. Some forms
of homosexuality are due to biochemical factors during development
in the womb.
Anyway, aside from that limiting criterion, that still leaves us
with an enormous “Pace phase space” (Say that three times fast!) to
explore.
This ramification space would contain, variations of me that
never moved to Seattle from San Francisco for example, versions of
me that moved to Chicago, Baltimore or Kansas City, versions where
my mother died and I was adopted by my aunt or my father, versions
of me that were orphaned, versions of me that stayed at Microsoft
and so on. If a guassian distribution applies there are some
versions of me in horrible circumstances and some in wonderful
circumstances. But note that this balance is impossible to change.
I can’t set things up so that all breaks work out for an infinite
number of mes.
Or maybe I can? Actually I’m very sloppy on the math. I’ll have
to look this up.
Anyway, that’s the big question for a writer trying to build a
story about multiverses. How do we create a conflict that matters?
How do we threaten to burn down Hilbert’s Hotel?
I want to comment on a previous post (all humans are vermin etc) but the comments field is no longer there on the older posts… you need to fix this as I have something to say!!!
Excelsior!
well this infinite progressions of possible Paces has my mind reeling– so now I know that all of the characters I have met over the years in Udra are real… even if you cant genetically be Izzy, somewhere there is actually a Pace with the same character traits– somehow I find this reassuring and I feel less threatened by the rodent menace! Of course it also means that somewhere you are conspiring with Bernie Madoff, doing intelligence work for the North Koreans and being a Koranic Scholar in the holy city of Qom as well as being a muscle beach pinup boy and minion of Pee Wee Herman, Senator of Texas and one day president of the Untied Federation of Planets! Yay! it is good to have an imagination (at least a balanced one) :)