The most popular discussions come from the belief in the Fermi paradox, which asks: if extraterrestrial life exists, then where is it?
Maybe a deeper question revolves around a ‘multiverse Fermi paradox’, as Caleb Scharf at Scientific American calls it, which suggests that the multiverse doesn’t exist since we cannot ‘perceive this’, so to speak. We’ve considered many options, now let’s examine these ideas.
The universe itself is the breeding ground of various theories, including the idea of multiverses. The multiverse can be structured in more than one way. For instance, these universes could be the cause of cosmic inflation or ‘tiny universes’, or they could be whole other words in the higher dimensional M-theory.
The multiverse could also be a combination of the two structures mashed together and interwoven. With this variable structure, anything can and will happen. What’s more, anything can happen numerous times!
Some physicists think this talk is utterly ridiculous. They believe that theories that say anything and everything is possible aren’t theories at all. These ideas, they say, are not based on the scientific method – they cannot be rationally falsified.
What if the most liberal idea of the multiverse existed? What if the idea of the Fermi paradox, which dates back from the 1950s, was the gospel truth?
Instead of ‘Where is everyone in the universe?’, we ask, ‘Where are the space travelers and civilizations amid the multiverse in existence?’ You get my drift, right?
Yet another question arises. If the universe is home to a vast number of realities, where anything can and will happen, many times over, then there is a possibility that beings can hop from reality to reality.
Why not? Just because we haven’t the technology to travel between realities, doesn’t mean that somewhere, sometime, someone else knows how to accomplish this feat. Physics in other realities may work much differently than in our understanding.
Where are these beings from other realities? Why don’t they visit us? Do other realities even exist?
It could be that beings from other realities find it difficult to move across the multiverse. It could also mean that no one really wants to. If you considered the Fermi paradox and what it entails, you will find this difficult to swallow. Somewhere, someone has to be curious like we are, don’t they?
Maybe, we are indeed alone. Or stranger still, maybe the multiverse doesn’t exist and we are still alone. Kind of depressing, isn’t it? What do you think?
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Very nice read, thanks for sharing.
Perhaps each moment we step into and the one we leave behind represents a different universe altogether. Some quantum physicists theorise that all time exists simultaneously.
I, for one, do not place too much emphasis on the hypothesis that the things we cannot perceive do not exist. Long as we cannot perceive more than three-dimensions, we may never crack open this mystery.