What If You Had Access To The Multiverse? | Unveiled

What If You Had Access to the Multiverse

Have you ever wondered what you’d find if you visited the Universe next door? Could you meet your evil twin? How about forms of life that never evolved on earth? What wild new possibilities would you unlock if you could hop from world to world?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if you had access to the multiverse?

For believers in the multiverse, the universe isn’t one, but one of many… with various explanations as to how and why that could be. For some models, there are endless universes alongside our own, all existing in separate bubbles of spacetime; in other versions, it’s reality itself which splits over and over again to create a multi-layered web; and then there’s also the idea that our universe is just one of many computer simulations, each one just slightly different from the next. The common theme, though, is that this life, this cosmos, isn’t all there is. And if you had the power to do so, you could switch between all plains of reality to experience infinite possibilities.

One common question to start with is; does this mean you’d have an evil twin? Well, if having an evil twin is something you’d be interested in, then good news! There are many multiverse models to suggest that there would be endless versions of you living endless versions of your life… some similar, but some very different. So, all across the multiverse, that would be a lot of twins - let’s call them infinitouplets - and while the concept of “evil” is famously difficult to scientifically define, if there are enough variations of you out there, the odds are near certain that at least some of them are jerks.

If you’re understandably not thrilled with the idea of meeting a twisted version of yourself, though, with the whole of the multiverse to search through you would at least have a choice. Maybe you could take a tour and see all of the different, less destructive ways your life could have played out, instead. What if you’d hit the big leagues as an athlete? Or you became a masked vigilante? An unparalleled genius? A national hero? How about being the founder of your own nation? Theoretically, if there are enough universes to visit, and you had access to all of them, then across those many, many worlds you’ll have done everything it’s physically possible to do. So, take your pick!

To a certain extent, the notion of there being many more than one of you fits with arguably the most popular scientific explanation of the multiverse… the inspiration for many a classic sci-fi scenario… The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. There’s some heavy science involved here, but it starts with a fairly simple question; are photons waves or particles? The problem is, they seem to act like they’re both… right up until you check them. In quantum physics, this is called superposition. Particles act like they exist in all possible states at once, then you measure them, and they suddenly commit (or collapse) to one or the other. Scientists have been debating exactly what causes this for about a century... but the line of thinking we’re most interested in today came back in the 1950s, when one physicist, Hugh Everett III, suggested that superposition isn’t really a collapse at all. Instead, he proposed that the photon still exists in both states at once, only in two separate universes. Our checking, or measuring, the outcome just lets us know which universe we’ve ended up in.

But here’s where things get really wild… because, according to some interpretations, our whole universe can behave in exactly the same way a quantum particle can. So, if Everett is right, there’s a new universe splitting off for every physically possible arrangement of every particle within the universe… which means a new world based on every random chance event, every flipped coin, every decision you or anyone else ever makes. That’s every electron in every atom in every star. Since the dawn of time. It turns out, then, that there’s a lot more to the multiverse than a just few evil twins on the other side.

At this stage the multiverse obviously hasn’t been proven, but if it did exist and really did work in this way, then travelling through it could actually prove, well, a bit underwhelming. Yes, you’d be crossing into parallel worlds like nobody’s business, but a lot of it would just look extremely familiar… because the more recently a world had split off from your own, the more it would look like home. Literally billions of them would be functionally identical except for one, single particle that had changed just a split second ago, somewhere in the vastness of space. So, it would be impossible to tell the difference between there and here, unless you were to run into yourself there… which would probably clue you in.

The further you move away from this world, though, the more obvious the changes would become. The differences you’d notice first would probably be the ones which affect your own, specific life. What if the particles aligned so that you had a muffin for breakfast this morning instead of cereal? Or you had brown hair instead of blonde? Or you’d grown up in a whole different country? The next question, then, as with the evil twin idea, is; are your doubles even really you? Are you responsible for what they do or don’t do? If they give to charity, is it your generosity they’re showing? If they break the law, are you to blame? And, more fundamentally, what happens if another version of you dies?

The MIT Professor Max Tegmark has looked into that last one in particular, developing a theory he calls Quantum Suicide. If you’ve ever had a close call with death - ever stepped out into the street and almost been hit by a truck or fallen off a ladder and walked away without a scratch - then although you might have been just fine, Tegmark’s theory is that another version of you… wasn’t as lucky. He suggests that every time you might die, there are other worlds where you lived and worlds where you didn’t. The result? If you had access to the multiverse, it would mean having access to countless alternate realities where you didn’t make it. In those worlds, then, your being there would be like a visit from someone from beyond the grave, and would be a major shock for your friends and family. On the bright side, as long as there’s a way to survive any potential cause of your own death, then there will always be a universe where you did. So, it’s not all bad.

But, of course, in the multiverse as in life, it’s not all about just our own selves. And the worlds that split off from ours a little (or a lot) further back would bring with them bigger, more wholesale and more fundamental changes. Now, travelling the multiverse becomes the greatest what-if machine imaginable. In the big picture, you might find worlds with radically different forms of life, or no life at all. You might step out onto the snowy tundra of an ice-age that never ended, complete with advanced sabre tooth tigers and dire wolves… or a place where even the dinosaurs never died out. In any multiverse reality where humans still did evolve on Earth, though, you could see an alternate outcome for every event in human history. One where Germany wins World War One; or where the Aztecs became a global superpower; or where the advent of things like the internet, or the electric car, or space travel happens at a much earlier date.

This alternate history idea raises some thorny philosophical questions, however, because if the multiverse were true does any of it even really matter? Do our choices even matter? Why bother, say, stopping climate change if there’s another world out there where it happens anyway? It could feel the same for smaller things, too. Why turn up for work, bake a nice cake, or get out of bed? If everything you do is cancelled out someplace else, why do anything at all? It’s a problem which could easily send you spiralling into despair, nihilism or madness… where having access to the multiverse becomes the greatest burden of all. Of course, the more positive approach would recognise that there would still be a value in the decisions you make in the here and now - in whatever level of the multiverse you were currently existing within. Would you want to live in a world where you stood by and just let an authoritarian regime take over? Or just allowed global warming to get out of control? Or would you rather be in the one where you stood up for your rights and beliefs? That choice, in every version of reality, would still be yours.

Travel far enough away from our own world, though, and even the most fundamental aspects of our reality, even the laws of physics, could disappear. Earth and life as we know it are relatively recent developments compared with the history of just this universe. Between the big bang and the earliest known life on this planet, there were around ten billion years of galaxies, stars and billions of other planets forming. That’s a lot of time and a lot of particle interactions to split off into alternate universes, in the majority of which the humble Earth just never happens at all. According to the Rare Earth Hypothesis, the odds are already incredibly slim for life to have formed here… but if the multiverse were true, we’d suddenly have a lens through which to explore precisely how unlikely our existence truly is.

On the other hand, with access to the multiverse, we’d also have a means through which to make our continued existence a lot more likely - purely because of the infinite opportunities it would afford us. Whenever resources run low, there would always be another plain of reality close to our own which could offer more… and were we ever able to move things between there and here, we’d have an unlimited supply chain. The only problem being that, because the multiverse would be full of our own doubles, they would also be encountering similar issues and wanting the same thing. Before long, then, an open multiverse could well lead to open warfare, with battlegrounds where soldiers are fighting identical versions of themselves, endlessly spawned from the infinite realities. Not good. At least there would be plenty of empty Earths, too - multiverse variations of this planet without humans - so hopefully we’d just find a way to share those out, instead.

Ultimately, the multiverse as per most interpretations would just be unfathomably, immeasurably massive. Far too big and vast for any one person to explore in their lifetime. But if you could find a way to navigate even a small part of it, you’d have access to more knowledge, adventure and resources than anyone else in history. You could solve all of this world’s problems or create a whole lot of new ones! Or you could just have endless fun finding places where everything’s the same, but trees are purple, penguins are red, and pigs actually do fly. In some worlds, this video won’t even exist… but, luckily, you’re in one where it does! And that’s what would happen if you had access to the multiverse.