Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Improbabble

There's this idea that an alternate universe is spawned every time there's more than one possible outcome to a given situation.

So the model of that multiverse (heh) would be sorta like a tree that starts simple (basically due to a lack of situations that could even have different possible outcomes) that spawns branches that spawn even more branches that spawn even more branches as time goes on.

And on and on.

The alternate universes near each other on the tree would tend to have similar histories, and the ones farther away from each other would have very different histories, but they would all go back to some point where they eventually converge in the past.

Yah, that's fine, I guess.

What sorta bugged me at first was thinking about how that meant there were some branches that had a lot of bad outcomes, and some branches that had a lot of good ones.

And was it actually necessary to have a different alternate universe for every single possible combination of bad and good outcomes?

Or was it okay to skip a few?

And if some of the combinations got skipped, what was the distribution system like for the combinations that didn't get skipped?

But then I started thinking about how there was one series of branches that had the worst outcome, over and over again, every single time, and one that had the best outcome, over and over again, every single time.

Yah, its all a matter of perspective and personal taste and stuff, one man's heaven is another man's hell, but if you could see all the branches, you could sort 'em out like that, even though you and me might not agree on how ya decided to do it, y'know, 'cause I'd tend to say the ones where I won the lotto were a little better than the ones where you won the lotto heh.

And what's worse, an alternate universe where nobody ever wins the lotto, or one where everybody always wins the lotto, and just gets their dollar or whatever back afterwards?

See, some of 'em are actually kinda existentially tricky and shit to sort out heh.

And that got me thinking about an alternate universe where, even though dice have six sides (let's say, for the sake of argument, you nerds), everybody always rolls a one.

Yah, no matter how many they roll, or how many times they roll 'em, and no matter who rolls the dice, or how many different dice they try, the damn things always roll a one, in this branch of the alternate universe tree.

Even though they could roll a two, or a three, even, it just never happens.

Its the Roll A One Branch, its right next to all the alternate universe branches where everybody rolls a one until somebody eventually rolls something else.

No matter how farfetched and horrible and stuff that may seem, and no matter how I'd like to think otherwise, it isn't impossible, its only horridly improbable.

Or is it?

I mean, it just doesn't seem right to me.

And it'd really mess our understanding of the universe up (and mess up our universe) if we had some curse like that Roll a One thing working against us heh.

Y'know, some scientist would say "I think we're just really unlucky, rolling ones all the time, I think, mebbe one day, we might roll a two, or a three even!" and the church would probably excommunicate him or some shit and that'd be the last we ever heard of that stupid idea ahaha.

Yah, you kinda need an alternate universe like that, y'know, just to eventually get to the alternate universe where folks rolled a one all the time, and then started rolling sixes over and over again, and never rolled anything else, and all the other possible combinations.

The Always Roll a Five Universe isn't so bad, I guess ahaha.

Well, junk like that just makes me go back to the drawing board and analyze exactly what a "possible outcome" is.

Yah, I mean, could people really throw the dice different in different alternate universes?

Is that something that could be different?

Or no?

I know dice rolling isn't hardly as random as it looks, I mean, if you were slightly superhuman, or a halfway-decent cheater, it wouldn't be random at all, you can make a six sided dice roll anything you want.

But even then, the folks that could choose what they wanted to roll might always choose to roll a one in the Roll A One Universe, for some reason, like peer pressure, or fear of excommunication, or something.

I'm probably looking at it on a level that's way too macrocosmic.

It probably has to be boring little quantum level probability field crap, and not anything big and fun to think about.

Or mebbe it only has to be that boring little quantum level probability field crap in this alternate universe.

'Cause that's only one of the possibilities heh.

Well, whatever, yer definitely stuck in this crappy alternate universe where I think of this shit ahaha.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This post is *so* Douglas Adams hehe.