It's how you look at it

Recently I’ve found myself fascinated with what I’ll call the “what-if” world. This fascination is largely borne of two underlying thoughts:

  1. What if we could look at our environments outside of how we now know it, and
  2. What if we could figure out the solutions to major problems, just by looking at something differently

I know. It seems pretty basic. But what if Newton hadn’t invented calculus? Or what if we had no such thing as ‘the scientific method’? It’s not the absence of these things that fascinates me, though: it’s thinking about what we would have to replace them.

Try it: pick a remarkable person (not your mom, of course), identify what they did, and then try to imagine the world without that. But don’t stop there: try to imagine what, or who, would have taken their place in history, and how our current understanding of the world is based entirely on that point.

I see events in history as a series of kinks & bends & turns, but existing only along a single line through time. Take one of those events away, and you’ll have an entirely different trajectory.

I know this is nothing new. “Sliders,” a TV show in the 90s, covered this quite well. Perhaps less thought of, though, is trying to diverge from that single trajectory through time.

The technical term for this is, I think, multidimensionality - the idea that every bit of chaos in the universe creates another dimension where the alternate outcome is explored. In alternate universes, you’re wearing all the shirts you considered wearing this morning.

So, what does the alternate universe look like where Columbus fell overboard on his way to the New World? Or where gravity isn’t 9.8 m/s2? Or where we evolved two opposable thumbs and not one?