"How did it start?"
"With me being a genius."

Oh, if I had a nickel...

Didn't Sam Carter already do this? Like a bajillion times?

I do sometimes ponder the existence of parallel dimensions. It amuses me to marvel at the the idea there may be an alternate, "good" version of me.
ha....imagine..

@Priam: Didn't I already do this? Like a bajillion times?

It wasn't until I met the alternate version of me who looooved Phish and other jam bands that I became the one who was a little too eager to shoot someone.

Yeah, one of my alternate-universe Doppelgängers managed to breach the wall into my universe... unfortunately, he's a hopeless layabout who sits around on my couch all day eating Funyons and watching the Spice Channel.

And hey.. "The One" wasn't lackluster... was a pretty good movie.

I'd actually watch that.

Also I'm pretty sure we'd take over the world if I pulled a bunch of alternate me's into one universe.

@Log1c:
I like to think my alternates and I take over the world, but really we'd probably spend too much time shagging, drinking and telling myself how wonderful we are.

@Miranda Kali: I think I rather prefer the naughty version

now that looks pretty cool Hope distribution can be done in a way that lets me see it.

@dOk:

Yeah I enjoy seeing it every time it comes on. Entertaining movie.

Perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything!

@ElijahDProphet:
Read the "Paratwa Saga" by Christopher Hinz. It solves a great deal in those books.

I've haven't yet seen a allohistory/parallel universe story really address or explore the following idea:

Suppose there are infinitely many classical Hubble volumes, not just a huge number but infinitely many. Suppose further that this continuum of Hubble volumes is eternal, no beginning and no end both in time and space.

Doesn't that imply an infinite amount of duplication? I don't mean just similar history, I mean exact duplication of any historical event in any Hubble volume. Doesn't recurrence time require this?

Doesn't that mean that any given moment there are infinitely many exact duplicates of me typing this nonsense scattered across infinitely many Hubble volumes and all eternity?

And if it is doesn't that imply that on the grandest scale every decision we sweat over is ultimately meaningless? On the plus side, it also seems to imply that none of us really die because our histories are repeated infinitely for eternity.

Sorry for going way off topic and getting into really abstract physics and math. It's just a weird idea I had that I've never really seen addressed in science fiction yet.

How do you write a story and create a conflict if every decision doesn't matter? To get poetic, can we burn down Hilbert's Hotel?

@spacedcowboy:
Me too, but I'd never want to get into a serious relationship with myself, being a pan-sexual, Gemini with commitment and responsibility issues.
I've had bad luck with psycho-twinkies in the past...

@Miranda Kali: See I guess my alternates are better with priorities, first world domination, then drinking and debauchery.

@corpore-metal: Ahh, but there is no such thing as infinity. How about a scifi story that deals with what infinity is and means and implies? (Your story is a subset of that)

@corpore-metal: Robert Anton Wilson drives many to apathy for a year or two.

They seem actually to have spelled the URL both correctly and in-. sChrodingersgirl works too. I bet they expected people to not know and so planned for the typo. Now there's that websavvy you're talking about.

@Miranda Kali: I'm a gemini too! Wow we should get together and bask in our glory

@Monsieur.Mind:

I suppose it's true that we have no empirical evidence for any actual infinites only potential ones but, it's certainly true that infinity actually exists--in platonic sense--as a mathematical concept. All of modern analysis (The branch of math called "Analysis" that is.) is based on the study of infinity. If infinity didn't exist in mathematics, math would be very strange.

It's a open and very deep philosophical question as to why math works so well for scientific descriptions of reality. Einstein pondered this--"the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

So I guess it's an open question as to whether the mathematical existence of infinity implies the existence of physical, and not merely potential, infinities.

Anyway, I'm no writer. If they are any out there, feel free to run with it.

I've worked with Schrodinger's Cat as a power animal before in shamanic rituals.

@corpore-metal: See "All the Myriad Ways" by Niven.

@randallnathaniel:
So R. Anton Wilson wrote about this stuff? Maybe I ought to check him out.

@Turlough: Yeah, I read that one. I don't think Niven took it as far as I'm implying. He just posited a very large and growing number of universes. Even still he arrived a similar conclusion: if all decisions ramify all possible ways, why sweat it?

So maybe a way to make things matter again is to destroy the infinite duplication or prevent it from happening some how. In such a multiverse, is it possible to shape it's physics in a such a why that some decisions never happen and thus change the over all balance of, for example, good and evil?

@corpore-metal: Before digging into his non-fiction, I'd read the Illuminatus! Trilogy, wait for the epiphany, then move onto the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy.

The latter work is a bit more nebulous. To put it mildly. Ahem.

@randallnathaniel:

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted" put me on an apathy trip for a few months in college. People always leave out the "Dare all on earth, there is no retribution anywhere" part.

I'm not as much into R. A. Wilson as i used to be, but he was a huge influence on me in my formative years.

@randallnathaniel:

Yes, definately start with Illuminatus! if you are interested in Wilson. Cosmic Trigger is a good one, too. P K Dick even mentions that book in VALIS.

@moff: See? Every homicidal maniac has a story.

@papercup mixmaster: bingo! Quite correct. :)

Is it bad that I spent most of the time watching that thinking that they should have spent just that little extra to get a decent sound guy? Yes, some things can be fixed in post. But it takes more skill than getting it right in the first place.

@corpore-metal: Would it help if you could say that in 99.99999% of all the infinite universes, event A happened, but in 0.00001% of all the infinite universes (which is, of course, still an infinite number), event B happened instead? So, for example, certain events are "strange attractors" and way more likely to be the norm, and not everything is possible, just a few variations.

I'm happy to see the myth about brit actors being superior (to everyone else) busted.

@Turlough:

Yes, that would certainly work if we are dealing with a very large yet finite number of universes but, if you are familiar with transfinite arithmetic, proportions like that don't work. With transfinites, by definition, dividing an infinite set by a finite number still leaves you with an infinite set that is exactly the same size.

But the math of transfinites only applies if we know there are infinitely many universes.

Otherwise, if the number is merely large, proportions as you say would apply.

(Yes, it's really scary how much I've thought about this on commutes and lunch breaks.)

@corpore-metal: I'm thinking more an infinite number of universes where only a finite number of possibilities can happen. Actually, I guess if there are only a finite number of possibilities, there'd have to be only a finite number of universes, or an infinite number of exact duplications, which is really the same thing.