Does the idea of Parallel universes scare you?

Question

Does the idea of Parallel universes scare you because it definetly scares me to know that there is another version of me who ended up taking the hit for some of my close calls in life..

there are a few times in my life where I was litterally hours or even seconds away from making a decision that would have DRASTICALLY changed my life for the worse, and those are just what I can remember!

I know we all have had CLOSE CALLS but being in the universe you experience now, you got lucky... or maybe you didn't and that accident you had another version of you did not...

anyway i find this very disturbing and think about other versions of me and how they would deal with some of the "close calls" I had in my life that for them would not be close calls at all and instead a reality they have to deal with...

what about you guys?

Answer 1

I'm not entirely convinced on the legitimacy of that theory. In terms of 'existence', sure, they exist in abstract form. You can think of your life as a flowing river that, if at any point anything had gone differently than it did, everything else following would have been changed in some way. The so called "butterfly effect" would drastically alter some things, and make only minor and insignificant changes in others. I don't believe that another world exists for each decision in the sense that it exists in a physical (matter, energy, time, etc) sense. For starters, they (they being theorists) give the often cited example of a quantum gun that would have a half chance of firing on someone who is locked in a room with no windows, is sound proof, etc and that because nobody knows without actually knowing the result, two parallel existences are formed. As I see it, there are several problems with this. I think that they make the incorrect assumption that life-altering decisions are somehow different than any other. Flipping a coin shouldn't be any different. Nor the speed of me typing. Nor any other mathematical function that can be divided infinitely. There would be infinite universes. Close calls, if thought about in a logical way, aren't any different from anything else that happens. I believe they exist in an abstract sense, but nothing else.

Answer 2

To me, parallel universes are the province of science fiction writers and scientists who must explain why their current mathematical formulations which explain the universe sometimes result in dividing by zero.

Parallel universes and extra dimensions can be used to explain these inconsistencies in the formulation.

To believe that they actually exist is the same as believing that God exists.

Maybe so.  Maybe no.