It could just mean that communication between the "universes" is
impossible. Which is not surprising, really, as the division between
"universes" in the MWI is what allows conscious thought to exist.
It is perhaps of more interest to other multi-universe scenarios that
are independent of the anthropic principle - I'm thinking here of
Smolin's black hole universes, and also patches that lie outside our
lightcone, which is almost the same thing. There is a "cosmic
censorship conjecture", that singularities can never be naked. Perhaps
the Fermi "Where are they argument" almost proves the case.
Cheers
Tim May wrote:
>
> If the alternate universes implied by the mainstream MWI (as opposed to
> variants like consistent histories) are "actual" in some sense, with
> even the slightest chance of communication between universes, then why
> have we not seen solid evidence of such communication?
>
> Amongst the universes, many ("many" is a huge number, obviously) of
> them will be way ahead of us. Some will have had galactic civilizations
> for a billion years. Some will be versions of Earth except that the
> Egyptians pioneered electronics and hence the world is a few thousand
> years "ahead" of our world...even assuming time is commensurate with
> ours.
>
> And so on. You can all imagine the rich possibilities.
>
> If these universes are even remotely able to affect each other, through
> perhaps enormously advanced technology, then the vast number of such
> possible worlds would suggest that at least some of them have figured
> out how to do so.
>
> And yet they aren't here. No visitors from alternate universes. No
> signals sent in, a la Benford's "Timescape."
>
> Perhaps we don't know how to listen. Perhaps there are so many possible
> universes to potentially visit that we just haven't been gotten to yet.
> Perhaps in a multiverse of so many possibilities, ours is just not an
> interesting destination. Maybe there's a kind of MWI censorship going
> on: since we are still debating the validity of MWI, we obviously are
> in a universe where MWI has not been proved through such a visit.
>
> (There are many divergent series here, making even crude estimates
> difficult and probably worthless.)
>
> Hmmmhhhh....
>
>
> --Tim May Prime, resident of Earth Prime
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Director
High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile)
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 (")
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Room 2075, Red Centre
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Received on Mon Sep 30 2002 - 21:48:59 PDT