Grrl Power #1207 – Eighteen school busses
I wouldn’t normally call out “special” but it’s such an uncommon use of the word that you might not even find it on a casual google. I couldn’t. I asked around on twitter to make sure it really was a word. It just doesn’t come up much in a layman’s world. Of course, as soon as Earth learns of other intelligent life, you can bet “specist” will enter the common vocabulary. Because people are the worst.
Folks were asking how demons were so freely out and about. Well, it’s because Deus is super smart and everything he does advances multiply layers of his many cascading plans, and definitely not because I’m a dummy and didn’t think about it while I was writing the previous pages.
Dabbler is out as an alien. The type of alien she happens to be is “Demon,” but Demon isn’t simply a species of alien. It’s somewhere between a Class and Phylum. Demon is such a broad term because there was a long period of their history when they were Genghis Khaning their way across the galaxy, both in the areas of conquest and ensuring that demonkind has a lot of direct descendants. Even if there’s only a 1 in 1,000 chance of a demon “pillager” getting species X pregnant, in the last 30 or so millenia, there’s been a buttload of chances for that roll. Even if the resultant offspring didn’t have the same chance of passing on its DNA (or whatever demons use) the half-demon was usually still fertile with other members of its own clade. Demons have flexible chromosomes too. If a male demon impregnates a female whatsit, the offspring would be a demotsit, and if a female demon got pregnant by a male whatsit, the offspring would be a watsmon, kind of like the whole Tigon/Liger thing. So there are a lot of things that are considered “demons” even if they’re hybrids of things from well outside the usual demon orders and classes.
I decided a long time ago that there aren’t parallel planes of existence in the Grrl-verse. Demons are straight-up aliens. There’s no dimension of Infernium or whatever. There are other planes, but it’s stuff like the Astral plane, and physical objects can’t exist there. You can’t visit, because the laws of physics are wildly different. And not like, there’s less gravity. That bugs me when you see it in shows, like everything’s the same but you can jump higher. No, if there was less gravity, then stars would have to be proportionally larger to initiate fusion and it would affect their lifespans and what elements they could produce and the rate at which they went supernova and everything else about that universe would be different. Planes in the Grrl-verse like the Astral don’t, for instance, have the Strong Electromagnetic Force, so there’s no matter whatsoever, or at least no atoms, and the entire place is just two clouds of positively and negatively charged particles, each the size of half of all the matter in our universe if it was in nebula form, whipping around each other in storms that would make the troposphere of Jupiter look mild.
One thing that bugs me in fiction is the near-universal acceptance of the idea of parallel universes. Now, I’m not up on cutting-edge theoretical physics, but I’m pretty sure most fiction gets that wrong. The idea that every choice you make creates a new potential timeline where X happens instead of Y is… wildly egocentric. You’re telling me that when I eat a grilled cheese for lunch instead of a Cup-o-Ramen, that decision somehow creates ENOUGH ENERGY to CAUSE A BIG BANG somewhere else 14 billion years ago, so that now there’s a parallel universe that’s perfectly synchronized with ours at the moment I made that decision? (Talk about a lack of free will for the 14 billion years leading up to my lunch since every single other decision and grain of sand and raindrop has to happen exactly the same as our universe.) Because if that’s the case, we urgently need to recalculate the number of calories in a grilled cheese.
No, my understanding is that there are infinite potential futures due to quantum uncertainty. Any given quantum particle might spin this way or that way or go up or down or whatever, and there’s no way to know that until it happens. That doesn’t mean there is a whole universe for every single possible position and momentum state for every single quantum particle in our universe, and hundreds of millions of goo-gillions of universes are snuffed out as each particle resolves its state for every picosecond tick of the clock in our universe. It’s not a place we can go, it’s just… mathematically conceptual.
And yeah, there’s some great sci-fi out there with mirror universes and whatnot. In fact it’s kind of hard to find a lot of sci-fi that doesn’t have a “meet ourselves but we’re evil” tangent. Still, the idea that there are an infinite number of versions of the characters out there carrying on the struggle always made me feel like nothing they did mattered. Like, “Oh no, the Goa’uld invaded Earth.” So? There’s a million-billion-googillion Earths where that didn’t happen. Then sometimes I would think that American media always has the good-guys win because we only see events from the universe where the good-guys won. Like the producers are filming actual events from different universes and if something bad happens that doesn’t sufficiently provoke positive drama then they switch feeds to Universe 03840980384083-b.
I could be, and probably am wrong about how multiverse theory works, but I’ve never seen an explanation that addresses my Big Bang-generating food choices. The point is, all supernatural stuff in the Grrl-verse is either just an alien – usually an alien with some innate magical ability, or are native terrestrial entities, again with some magical traits.
Taxonomy would be a pain in the ass in a magical world. Consider that if elves are Fey and come originally from the Feywilds, and orcs come from Shadowfell and are descendents of whatever is the Fey equivalent that lives in there, (which may or may not be the case depending on the particulars of a fiction’s lore – I know in LOTR both elves and orcs had Fey origins, but Sauron got his hands on a group of elves and gave them evil cooties or something.) But for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s how it is. Chances are, elves and orcs would never be able to interbreed. Half-elves and half-orcs, sure, but not Elcs or Orves. BUUUUT, in a world with magic, the laws of nature are really just suggestions. Some mad or just slightly lonely wizard is going to make it happen if he really wants it, so what do taxonomic charts look like in that world? Half-elves, Elcs, Half-giant/half-dwarf (don’t think too hard about the logistics or the either very easy or almost definitely deadly delivery), Dwagons (half-dragon/half-dwarf, or possible half-dwarf/half-wagon), Koboltyughs (half-kobold/half-otyugh – don’t think about how that one came about either), and that one guy who is half-gnome/half-gelatinous cube. A gelatinous gnome. No one knows how that happened.
And don’t forget non-player character race mixes, like a Displacer Otyugh. I mean, that one makes sense. An Otyugh and a Displacer Beast meet each other and are like, “Hey, baby, nice tentacles you got there.” The hard part would be lining up the mating apparatus. “No, dummy, I’m over here! You haven’t even mounted me yet!” “Oh, thank god, I just thought you were super loose.” “How dare you!” *fight fight fight/eventual devolvement of fighting into mating/kids*
My point is Taxonomy would be a right mess in a world like that.
The September vote incentive is up! Let’s call it the November vote incentive and just say I’ve still got two I.O.U’s, eh?
Well, Dabbler is doing her Dabbler things, and the Patreon version has a nude variant and a comic that… I don’t know, expounds on the goings on of the initial picture?
.
.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Don’t suppose the vampire will try to hypnotize him and there’s going to be some weird explanation for why it doesn’t work on him.
Maybe vampiric hypnotism just allows the vampire to interface with the victim’s mind, and a sort of mental wrestling match follows. The hypnotism only works if the vampire wins the match. Which they are normally going to do, but…
Deus, of course, wins the match when Ingsol tries it, and forces him to speak in limerick just to teach him not to do that again.
So like Dr. Doom, he’s doing his mental fortitude savings throw with loaded dice.
Super Intelligence including Strong Will wouldn’t be all that weird
The only ‘super’ power SmugD possesses, is super douchery
I still cling to the hope that one day we’ll see SmugD flustered or flummoxed.
if it happens Sydney will be involved, and Max will have complicated emotions.
I’m pretty certain he can sense the deep desire of others. That would map everything we have seen about him.
I think part of the many-worlds theory is understanding that all worlds already exist in all forms, so there’s no creation going on as you describe.
If it feels to yourself as if you have Free Will, then you might as well behave as if you do indeed have it, and also as if everyone else does too. The whole metaphysics of whether you actually have it ends up going nowhere.
Yeah, I’ve had that argument a LOT with various people over the years. My conclusion has always been and always will be that it ultimately doesn’t matter if your choices/actions are determined by your own free will, by fate, by god, by biology and physics, by your programing in the simulation, or by anything else, so long as we can’t prove who or what is ultimately responsible for the things you say and do beyond you, you have to take responsibility, and so long as you are the only one responsible for your words and actions then it doesn’t matter how they are chosen or whether you are the one who chose them, you are the entity that bears the burden of responsibility so for all intents and purposes you are treated as though you have free will by all the systems of society around you, so you may as well act like it.
For me, the question is what is the thing that we call “you”. And I would agree that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a completely predictable state machine or a totally random box of dice, whatever it is at the bottom of the stack that makes the decisions is “you”.
The many-worlds theory presupposes a creator and predetermination, since without choice there would be only one outcome. Unless the Big Bang really was an industrial accident…
No creator necessary except in the minds of those who have already decided one must exist
Unless your vision of “the Creator” is quantum field fluctuations…
Predetermination doesn’t seem not necessary or relevant to “many worlds”. Quite the opposite. If anything was predetermined, then there wouldn’t be any actual splitting of worlds. You’d just be describing a static manifold and the statistical aspect of quantum physics would be just tracing a path.
Ehhhh. Sure, that’s a way to imagine many worlds. Your consciousness is moving you down a preexisting static manifold and at each moment you select a random direction forward in time through n-space.
“I could be, and probably am wrong about how multiverse theory works, but I’ve never seen an explanation that addresses my Big Bang-generating food choices.”
There are multiple conceptions here that handle this detail.
In Piper’s Paratime series, the big bang actually created an essentially infinite number of timelines, but they then proceeded to evolve mostly independently until the invention of cross-planar travel. There’s some suggestion that they interact enough to cause neighboring timelines to have nearly identical histories, but no new timeline is created when a fork happens, it’s just two lines that were initially parallel diverging.
In some other series the parallel timelines interact so much that people can accidentally wander across them; When yo misplace your car keys, it’s not bad memory, it’s because you tripped and ended up in a timeline where you’d put them someplace else.
But, yeah, back in the real world? I think the idea of multiple timelines is bogus. To the extent physics theory suggests alternate universes, they WOULD have different physics, you couldn’t just pop on over even if travel were possible, you’d become a nuclear explosion or, best case, just drop dead.
Now look at the “universe” as a cloud of potentials, some of which are collapsed by your perception and some of which are not. When you stop perceiving them, they stop being collapsed. They don’t represent different universes, just different aspects of this one.
Your keys this morning, Monday, are a potential in a cloud of states based upon where they might have been left based upon what you might have done with them. When you start looking for them, and they aren’t on the doorknob, then the chances that they are RIGHT NOW on the doorknob have been reduced, but not eliminated. Then you look three other places, and eventually you find them ON THE DOORKNOB.
At the moment, you have arrived at the specific state where last night you had put your key lanyard over the garage doorknob where it was supposed to be, this morning mistakenly missed seeing them, then eventually found them. If things had gone differently, you might have collapsed them on the entry table or in the kitchen. By the time next week rolls around, you will be in the universe where on last Monday (today) you 71% found them on the doorknob, 13% on the entry table, 4% on the floor behind the entry table, 8% in the kitchen, etc.
Since it does not matter one whit to the universe where your keys were, it does not have to track that state, and it can drop back into a quantum cloud. Much easier computation. And if your wife remembers you finding them in the kitchen, and you remember finding them on the doorknob, you can be confident that you are at least 8% wrong. (For domestic tranquility, that rounds to 100.)
Unless the means of crossing between the two alternate realities “translated” you to match the reality you are entering in some way. You might not be able to be matter in that universe unless your matter was converted to what is the equivalent of matter there. Which then begs the question of if you would even realize you were from another universe to begin with?
Multiverses-Check out the data and the articles on the John Webb Telescope. Looks like there was no “Big Bang”, there’s another “universe “ that we can see next to ours and that the cosmos is truly infinite with an infinite number of universes.
Not quite sure what’s going on with the background action, but it’s interesting.
Seems a demon either dropped its illusion on purpose or by accident due to issues with the the veil. Either way, the secretary then jumps to reactivate it before anyone notices and gets into a slap fight with the demon.
Atleast thats my take.
My take was:
Panels 1 and 2 – Demon and Alari giving each other malicious side-eye.
Panel 4 – Demon drops Veil to tweak Alari, succeeding.
Panel 5 – Alari, enraged at Demon’s effrontery, attacks. Demon Warrior vs Alari Secretary, attack easily deflected (BIP).
Panel 6 – Demon reassumes Veil, Alari attacks again using different strategy, slap-fight ensues.
I took the “BIP” as the Alari forcing the demon back into proper camouflage.
I think it’s a little early in the process to be abandoning the Big Bang. A lot more data to be gathered and analysis to be done.
Also the claims of no big bang aren’t really backed up by the data we are seeing, it is more an adjustment of what we know. The theory is still sound, we are just finding things that we didn’t account for, this doesn’t disprove it just adds to out understanding that we didn’t have a full picture of what happened right after the start. The Big Bang happened and the claim otherwise is a lie.
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-science-denial
I find it annoying when an article like that doesn’t explain what the issue really is. Apparently JWST measured some galaxies that were supposed to the the farthest/oldest so far, and they were larger and better structured than they were predicted to be. So we have to figure out whether it’s the telescope’s calibration that’s off, or whether some parameters of the Big Bang model need to be updated.
That’s “vaguely interesting”, not “world shaking”.
You writing “dwagon” makes me think of the webcomic Erfworld, which hasn’t happened for a LONG time.
That truly was an innovative gaming web comic, sad that artists’ wife got cancer (terminal illness?) and they had other priorities than the comic.
Booping shame what happened to the Balders, I hope they’re doing better these days. Even now, for years later, my muscle memory is STILL regularly typing “erfworld.com” into my address bar, I was/am that hooked.
I think Deus works far better as this semi ambiguous “villain” than an out and out bad guy because it’s far more entertaining this way. It kind of reminds me of the way that Baron Klaus Wulfenbach was never an out and out villain and his “evil empire” was infinitely preferable to what happened. While Deus wants to ‘Rule the World’ , seeing as the. Earth is only just preventing being taken over by the various powers at play , having him in charge should actually prevent millions of ordinary people dying in the possible coming conflicts.
Of course a vampire’s agenda wouldn’t fit his timeline. Unless Deus has discovered the secret of immortality without becoming a vampire himself (which I wouldn’t put past him) I imagine he’d like to take over the world before he’s dead.
This, at least with me raises the question of supers aging. Sydney, baring some influence of the orbs will age. As will Math and Peggy. I’m betting that Harem will age as will since invulnerability doesn’t seem to be a part of her powerset but what about folks like Max and Hiro? Achilles seems to be aging very slowly at most but Stalwart seems to be aging a bit. I suppose it might just vary from super to super but I would bet that invulnerability would protect a super from many of the things that age us regular folk.
Most of the “things that age us” are oxygen radicals – oxygen atoms with free electron who would really like to grab some other atom or at least turn into ion.
But yes, it’s very likely with how diverse supers are that they will age differently as well.
And there definitely is immortality somewhere on Sydney’s skilltree. The only question is if she select it soon enough.
>Most of the “things that age us” are oxygen radicals – oxygen atoms with free electron who would really like to grab some other atom or at least turn into ion.
True. And the thing that makes the supers resilient to physical harm and gives them ideal bodies would in all likelihood work against free radicals too. The other main thing seems to be telomerase cutting, and the right (epi)genetic change can turn it off in a controlled way just like other changes give supers their bodies.
>And there definitely is immortality somewhere on Sydney’s skilltree. The only question is if she select it soon enough.
At the pace she is going, she will have the rest of skilltree unlocked in a few years. In story time, it has been just a few months, and she has already unlocked a handful. As the plot thickens and she gets to do even more and more frequent super stuff, the rate of unlocking is only going to hold steady or accelerate.
That very much depends on what’s needed to unlock higher tier options, is general use enough or are there specific requirements?
Even if it’s just general use it doesn’t mean that it’s the same amount of use to get a higher tier ability activated
It is very likely that the same factor that gives supers ideal bodies and makes them physically reslient by default also makes them resistant or immune to aging. For Math and Jobberwokky, I tend to assume their superpower is being really good at physical abilities that are useful for martial arts, just like Deus’ is super-intelligence with a topping of super-charisma. If you ask my opinion, Stalwart probably is the case of a super’s actualization of their ideal body being partially tied to their notion of beauty, and his incorporating a DILF element.
If one of the orbs is at least partially focused on providing life support, chances are there is immortality somewhere in its skilltree.
Fun fact: in at least some models, the total energy of the universe is zero, which handily solves the sandwich-choice energy problem.
Standard issue SF multiverses do still have problems – the whole idea that it’s human-scale decisions that trigger branching is easier to present for storytelling purposes, but contrary to the many worlds version of quantum mechanics where the “decisions” are quantum-scale events butterfly-effecting out into things we can perceive. So, rather than getting a world where everything is the same except traffic lights have a reversed meaning, a world which had diverged far enough for traffic lights to be different would have a ton of other differences. It’s just that branching doesn’t necessarily have energy costs.
Absolutely! The traffic-light thing in the pilot for Sliders was so fucked up. The cultural and linguistic changes to avoid the mental clusters “red-blood-fire-danger” and “green-plant-food-safe-okay-go” in Euro culture would be immense.
(I can imagine red-blood-fire-warmth-safety and green-poison-rot-danger clusters, especially in a northern climate, but that’s not our culture.)
*****
With regard to human-level decisions making big differences… remember that while that one human is making big changes, everything else that happened is happening *randomly* based upon likelihood. You decide to turn left, that night a different person wins the lottery, not because of your decision, but because every potential event was low probability, and the universe had no reason to hold that one in place.
Hmmm. Speaking of lottery winners, most of them end up broke after only a couple of years, and no one remembers which week they won, and eventually whether they won. universes can merge as soon as no one really gives a shit… and who cars about a little Mandela effect every now and again?
Some human decisions – not all, probably just a small minority – are actually generated by quantum effect in our brain. Most of them, however, are predetermined by your experience.
I’m not buying this “merge as soon as no one gives a shit”. YOU may not remember who won when, but it’s clearly written in accounting of the lottery company and used as input in the algorithm they are using to set next stakes. The effect will NEVER completely disappear. Luckily, the number of universes is unlimited, so it’s not occupying space for more interesting universes.
My thoughts on ending up with infinite worlds is that if they can split, why can’t they also merge. Say you have 3 choices available for breakfast, choices 1 an 2 result in you having a perfectly average meal and 3 days later you can barely remember what you had and it hasn’t affected your life in any way, so the parallels merge back together. Option 3 ends up giving you a dicky stomach and you spend extra time on the toilet and miss your bus, missing the bus could end up making you late for work and getting fired, it could mean you just get to work later than normal and nobody really cares. A month from now having been fired has massively changed your life with you on a very different parallel, on the other hand being slightly later for work than normal with nobody caring one way or the other one day can merge back into the averageness of the universe.
it’s cute how the two at the back compete to be the number 1 evil secretary lady
It’s easier to explain to the average Joe that in that universe this character choose right instead of left than to explain about this particle choose to spin in that direction. Joe can easy guess that choosing right you meet different people, avoid being run over the car or whatever big difference its gonna be.
We can see the ramifications and even understand the ones we cannot see but the author ended up showing us.
And about the big bang… think that in a number of potencial infinite altertatives universes there is also a potential infinite energy whats one more or less big bangs among us?
My favorite example of this is *spoilers for About Time*
…
The main character can travel backwards through his personal timeline, re-inhabit himself and make different choices, then return to his current time. He discovers that once he has a child, he cannot travel to before the conception without risking coming back to an entirely different child due to a different gamete winning the race in the “new” timeline.
That hilarious. I didn’t know they made something about that. I always complained about that, the probabilities of the same gamete winning the race all the time must be abysmal to the point of near imposibility.
How does your current stance on multiverse, parallel dimensions, etc. work with the Team-Ups and Crossovers book?
Astra’s multiverse DOES permit multiple realities, so they CAN visit each other.
I’m still waiting for The Mighty Halo to visit The Astraverse.
She’d be the only human in that world who has pre-EVENT DNA.
That makes no sense.
If the Grrl-verse doesn’t have any parallel planes of existence, then there is no WtC-verse to visit them.
Point being, saying “I decided a long time ago that there aren’t parallel planes of existence in the Grrl-verse.”
while simultaneously having allowed (and co-wrote?) a parallel plane story involving the Grrl-verse is a contradiction.
You can have many worlds, while simultaneously not having the whole negation-of-free-will-every-choice-has-a-universe thing.
Every universe is its own thing, and if some things happen/exist that correspond to something in another *verse, then that’s either pure coincidence, or signs of the isekai trope where the reincarnated/summoned person inflicts their culture/ideals on the other world, and it gets adopted.
Obviously those stories aren’t about the characters from the Grrl-verse, which has no parallel planes, but from a parallel plane where there exists a Grrl-verse identical to this one, but in which there are Parallel planes….
Or just call them non-parallel. Tangential plans that touched that one time and will never touch again.
Non-Parallel – that means you can consume them with meat or with dairy, right?
Shh!
this is the comment section. we will not be silenced. not without billionaire money anyway.
*begins singing somewhere far away from key*
According to quantum and such, everything exists in all possible states until you collapse it, with many worlds being essentially :what if it isn’t collapsing when we look in the box, but the superposition is expanding to cover everything?” So now, it isn’t a box where the cat is alive and dead, but a universe where it is alive and dead, or rather, one universe where its dead, one universe where its alive. And since quantum is everywhere, there’s a universe for every possible outcome for every possible uncertainty, with that just being called decision as a shorthand.
Might as be asking how the Marvel vs DC cross-over events are still considered canon in the past after the events of Death Metal in DC re-wrote how their multiverse worked with the whole *walled in multiverses for the comics, shows, and movies being seperate yet clearly following similar paths multiverses* yet the comics one was supposed to be hidden from the Hands before this event and now everything is one big infinite multiverse after.
or how Marvel can still claim ALL their properites are numbered universes in one big multiverse yet the multiverse stories from the comics, animated shows, and the MCU all clearly contradict each other *including different multiverse stories within the comics*.
-of course DC and Marvel we can toss it out as too many chefs in the kitchen,
but in terms of different company/owner cross-overs *rule of cool*
or the fanfiction rule (sure the characters and settings crossover but who says these are the same individuals from the timelines we are following and not alternate timeline ones) *which also applies to things like the One Piece/Dragon Ball cross-over, or any video game cross-overs like Marvel vs Capcom or Mortal Kombat vs DC.
The many worlds hypothesis doesn’t actually have anything directly to do with choice, except in the assumption that the choice is affected by quantum effects.
The actual principle is essentially that it skips the whole “collapsing the wavefunction” thing (which is even more observer-centric) with the idea that instead of a wavefunction collapse, the act of observation results in quantum entanglement between the observer and the observed. So in the case of the infamous cat thought experiment, the cat is in a superposition of being alive and dead… and when you open the box, you are entangled with the cat and enter a quantum superposition between being observing the cat as alive and observing the cat as dead. However, the portion of the observer’s wavefunction that observes the cat as alive cannot communicate with the portion that does (mostly because there isn’t actually an observer wavefunction or a cat wavefunction, but scientific-notation-number of wavefunctions of individual particles).
So from an energy perspective, there’s still only one universe in the ‘many worlds’ hypothesis. It’s just that said universe is in a complicated set of superposed entangled states. The ‘world’ we subjectively experience is the sum total of everything that we have been quantum entangled with.
Came here in part to say this. I’ll address the cosmological multiverse.
Have you ever heard of vacuum energy. also called zero-point energy? Basically empty space isn’t empty, but rather has a certain level of quantum energy, which is manifested in virtual particle pairs (sometimes an electron and positron will just spring up in empty space, and just as quickly annihilate one another). It’s speculated that this quantum energy may be the Dark Energy which causes the universe’s expansion to accelerate.
It may be that there are lower states of vacuum energy possible. In that case the universe is like a very cold, very still lake of very pure water, where a slight disturbance would cause he formation of ice which spreads rapidly from the point of origin. In physics this is called vacuum decay, and would result in a region of space expanding at the speed of light with different laws of physics within. The good news is you wouldn’t see it coming.
Conversely, there may be *higher* states of vacuum energy possible. In that case, our universe may be the result of vacuum decay in a higher energy universe. Since that higher universe has a higher vacuum energy, and hence more Dark Energy, it would be expanding much more quickly than ours, and would be unimaginably vaster.
Our universe’s expansion means that some regions would never be affected by a particular incident of vacuum decay, and there may be multiple such incidents. Similarly, since our parent universe is so much vaster the number of universes at our energy level is large. So large, in fact, that the probability works out that there are likely multiple universes that are identical to ours, and that vary from ours in tiny, small, large and enormous ways. However, as in the quantum many worlds, there is no way to interact with them, because the distance makes traveling to the edge of the observable universe seem like a walk across the room, and you’d have to travel through the parent universe, which would undoubtedly destroy you.
Actually, with respect to the quantum many worlds, it’s possible that travel through a wormhole would lead you to a different wave function. Of course the existence of wormholes is still theoretical. This possibility is due to the behavior of analytic extension on non-simply-connected spaces, which I don’t think I’ll go into.
I only JUST received a notification for this reply. Weird.
Yeah, I’m familiar with false vacuum decay, brane theory, black-holes-as-big-bangs-of-new-universes, and a variety of other cosmological multiverse theories. The commentary, however, was relating to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics where every event spills off into parallel universes, so I focused on that and how many worlds does not actually require ever-increasing energy. Cosmological multiverse theories don’t create parallel universes of the “they were the same until THIS event caused them to branch off” type.
(I’d also note that I’m pretty sure you don’t get parallel universes where you find the same people but with their morality flipped, and where the branch-off point was centuries ago. It wouldn’t take much for the ripple effect to mean that completely different people are being born. Mirror universes would require some mechanism requiring that different versions of the same people exist in both.)
I’m very sceptical that wormholes could bridge between quantum many worlds universes – they could bridge space, time, maybe even hyperspace, but I can’t see a wormhole shifting your perspective from one state in the entangled quantum superposition to another. There might be some weird future technology that could do it, but I don’t think it would be wormholes. Although it would probably take a theory of quantum gravity to be sure either way, and my degrees were a while ago now and I haven’t been keeping that close an eye on developments of how general relativity and quantum mechanics interact (apart from Kerr’s paper on how black holes might not have singularities after all, which I haven’t got to reading it, but it basically seems to boil down to the assertion that there must be singularities in black holes being the result of typical astronomer “assume a spherical cow” oversimplification).
Hey! Evel Knievel was a legend, and I dare anyone to say otherwise!
https://youtu.be/LTii4vZwEQU?si=z8PR7CpHRqFhqH4X
The ’70s were fucking weird.
there had to be consequences for the drugs of the 60’s.
Specism probably won’t catch on as a word. The word racism will keep being misused as it does now to describe all sorts of discrimination apart from actual racism.
Specism is a word, it’s just generally used by people with such a bad understanding of ecology that they want to wipe out all predators for preying on other animals.
Because they consider valuing the life of the predator more valuable than lives of each prey animal the predator consumed speciesist.
Let’s say as an example I hated Polar Bears and think if they go extinct it’s no great loss.
How is that not speciesism?
OK, I know it already is a word, but I was referring to the context of future use to describe discrimination against aliens.
Smug-D at it again I see… Now he’s pushing his luck with the counsel? I don’t care how smart he is, sooner or later Karma is going to tap on his shoulder and say “HEY! Time to pay up!” Deus is trying to force his way into the entire galactic society and drag all of Earth with him, kicking and screaming in terror the whole way. Too many people are still believing the “old ways” and are not ready for the true world, the mind boggles at the social break-down that could trigger! It’d be like handing out AK’s to gorillas and stand back and watch the fun!!
Ingsol: “You and what army?”
Deus: “Well actually …”
Ingsol: “… right. Got it.”
You’ve kinda got the wrong dynamic there. Ignol isn’t the one that would be saying that.
He just came here to warn him about something very dangerous and risky.
> I wouldn’t normally call out “special” but it’s such an uncommon use of the word that you might not even find it on a casual google.
Let me try… And here is first Google result
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/special
He meant special as in the adjective form of species, like how the adjective form of race is racial, and none of the definitions of special provided by your link match that
as in
series is to serial
as
species is to special
Sadly for the Council they are about to learn that there is an entire ocean of difference between “You can’t do that” and “We don’t want you to do that”
Ingsoll: You can’t DO that!
Deus: I think you’ll find I can. Did you mean to say I shouldn’t?
‘The 70s and 80s were f-ing weird’.
That is putting it MILDLY. I was born in 1972. I remember the latter part of the 70s vaguely and almost all of the 80s quite well.
Funny. In some ways, we have come full circle. We went liberal for a bit and now, we are going arch conservative again. Admittedly, Reagan just did dirty deals with Iran and drug dealers, not surrendering 20 years worth of effort and lives to the Taliban, but still… Same old, same old, huh? And people wonder why I do not like Trump? I still remember his short term profit BS from the 1980s as the epitome of sleazy corporate land developers and he has not changed AT ALL. At least Reagan knew how to act like a statesman sometimes instead of an con-man and bully.
Also? Love him or hate him, Reagan was a patriot. Trump? Nah. Too expensive.
The 80″s were fun until Aids kicked in. We were rocking along in our self centered hedonism and the it turned out that the fun stuff can kill you. And then it turned out that cocaine is addictive. Who would have believed it? All of a sudden existential dread was a thing again.
And don’t forget the wonderful fear of nuclear war OUTSIDE of video games.
We came just as close in 1984 as we did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not many people know about Able Archer, but we very nearly did have WWIII that year because of an utter lack of communication. Funny thing? We were saved from it by a Russian who questioned his orders.
Deus better hope his bodyguards are up to snuff, because the list of people who are going “our lives would be much easier if someone whacked this guy” is growing rapidly.
You mean, to include everyone who has met him?
Everyone who has met him with the exception of the bulk of his citizenry, several members of Archon (Maxima might think her life would be easier with him out of the way, but not enough to act on it; Sydney seems to respect him; Harem is happily bumping uglies with him), etc. He’s a very charismatic guy (it’s part of his powerset) and seems to have laudable goals.
And yeah, ticking off the Council is a bad idea. Then again, he has a bodyguard who was able to largely no-sell the attacks of one of the Council’s big boogeywomen, plenty of other high-tier bodyguards, and probably plans upon plans to deal with any members of the Council who attempt to come after him. I’d imagine he’s pretty safe. Maxima and Sydney are his primary threats, and as I noted above, neither really wants to fight him (ok, Max might want to, in a “I wonder what tricks he has up his sleeves” kind of way, but not in a “I’ll tear his head off” kind of way, and that’s what Deus would have to fear from her).
I’m sure Sydney is not in that group (but the Venn diagram of “people who’ve met Deus” and “people who want to kill Deus” is almost a single circle.
And this is how Deus gets a seat on the council if only so they can keep a better eye on him.
As a firm believer in the multiverse, there’s no need for additional energy to create multiple big bangs, as time began with an infinite amount of cosmic energy creating an infinite number of big bangs leading inevitably to an infinite number of entropic heat deaths. All worlds begin more or less the same, and all end more or less the same, they just have infinite possible paths to get there (and possibly some impossible ones, depending on how many dimensions we add on top of the initial six spacetime ones). No additional matter or energy exists; in one universe, a collection of atoms exist as your body, but in another, those same atoms are decomposing flesh which enriches the plot of soil which serves as your unmarked grave. They’re the same atoms, they just occupy different 3D coordinates at one point in the 5D metatimeline than another one. Each one is a sixth dimensional solid, whose complete shape cannot be observed except from the seventh dimension at minimum.
Since you bring up the whole quantum mechanics issue, I theorize that among superpowers, there are four God powers:
1. Omnipotence–you can create or destroy anything, but you don’t necessarily know how to do it.
2. Omniscience–you know everything, past and present, you know what everyone is thinking, and you can determine the future based on which events you interfere with by using “curated facts”. (you may know how to do something, but you are still limited by your mortal power limits)
3. Immortality–You will live forever without aging to decrepitude.
4. Invulnerability–You can get directly hit with an atomic bomb and all it does is piss you off because you WERE enjoying 25-year scotch and Cuban cigar.
If were to choose one of these for myself, it would be omniscience with the added ability to directly pass information to another because time may be a factor and verbal explanations may be fraught for more than one reason.
The biggest problem with #2 is that you don’t have the time to parse everything you know, let alone react to it, and knowing the results of your decisions may end in cascade failure.
So you probably want to know “anything”, not “everything”, and the mental speed and poise to make use of it and select future alternatives.
Well, that’s the thing with knowing everything. You, by corollary, know how to parse everything.
Putting aside real-world multistage theory, which I don’t have the qualifications to understand, I believe that you are indeed missing the point on fictional multiverses. As I understand it, a new universe isn’t created by the act of you eating a grilled cheese unless the writer is a moron or thinks the audience will be morons. The multiverse is an infinitely branching kaleidoscope like the effects from the Dr. Strange movie and you grilled cheese is just one of the infinite branching points. The real question is, how do the travelers find these universes? It’s one thing when they travel via magic or God powers. But science? Ha. Our understanding of our own universe is based on math equations using dots of light in the distance. How would we even begin to figure out where a universe diverges from another?
Goblin Comics Page 17-2022 resolves the whole “Free Will with quantum variants” thing.
All the universes already exist. It is your choice that makes you “hop” to the universe corresponding to your choice.
I absolutely love this webcomic!
My love for it started with the personalities of the main characters and how they interact. It has grown to your take/handle on the politics of multiple species of intelligent life. The nuance in both the tropes and interesting new perspectives on how humans handle new information, tech leaps, etc makes me wonder what an actual published book would look like from you author-nim!
Cute to see the big bad demon and the Alari getting into a slapping-match in the background :)
Also, thought Scarlet was the good vamp, it was the Viking Vamp who was the bad one… wasn’t it? You know, the one who ended up wearing the shrinking panties
Guunhilda? was the bad blonde vampire, yes.
Gunnhilda was one of the vampires working with Sciona.
Scarlett is Ingsol’s offspring and is accompanying her sire on this trip to DC.
My read of this situation is that it’s following the other people that were in the meeting with the senator about starting a Dungeon.
While I won’t argue with your opinion that Deus is a straight-up villain and/or douchebag (better people have tried), you won’t convince me that everyone he talks to is also a bad guy.
Damint! Thought that that was the other vamp, the one working with Gunny and Sci-fright
Here is my best understanding. Imagine being at the cross section of 2 roads. Pictorial – ‘X’. You have two choices ahead of you. But you also have two choices behind you. The two choices ahead of you tell you what you might do. The choices behind you tell you what you have done to get to where you are. Time may not force you forwards or backwards. Going forwards or backwards is the same thing according to Time, you just have to make a choice which path to choose. A lot of different paths could have led to where you are now.
That might be the reason why we’ve never experienced Time travelers. It’s just as difficult to predict a specific future, as it is to get to a specific past. For instance if we went into the past how would we know it was our past since we cannot check everybody else’s past at the same time as well. The further you travel neither direction the less likely you are to be able to get back to where you were.
We are in the middle a continuous divergence of choices, AND at the end of a conververging number of choices.
The way I look at multiverse relates to Schroedinger’s cat – You can view it as that there is one universe in which the cat is alive and one in which it is dead, depending on what you see when you open the box… or you can look at it as one universe with a box that has a 50% dead cat.
Today, you are in a universe where (no matter what you actually remember) for breakfast on Monday a week ago you 51% had a grilled cheese, 17% had a sausage croissant, 23% skipped breakfast, and 9% rummaged something from the cupboards. This accounts for why you can be absolutely perfect on your diet and not lose weight… because the other you’s cheated on the diet at random times, and your body all averages out.
This accounts for the Mandela effect as well. The universe maintains a truth locally rather than globally, and “garbage-collects” all the things that don’t matter. So there’s not an entire big-bang for eating the grilled cheese. There’s just a series of local windows, because your consumption has no effect on anything outside of a one-block radius.
Your paragraph1: You can tell the difference between these through interference effects.
Larry Niven, “All the Myriad Ways”.
Yeah, this all reminded me of Larry Niven’s having thoroughly worked over the possibilities back in the 70s. I especially liked “broadening of the bands” from the Cross-time stories. Yes, the universe diverges with every decision. So just because YOU went cross-time traveling for a few days doesn’t mean your universe remained static. Billions of people continued making decisions, so when you decide to go “home”…well, “home” is now an infinite number worlds that diverged from the moment you left. Any one of them will do, right?
The flaw in the sandwich-choice-energy problem is that conservation of energy simply isn’t relevant between universes. Conservation of energy is a property of universes individually, not collectively; expecting the total energy across all parallel universes to remain constant is like expecting the combined height of every living adult human to remain constant on the basis of observing that each individual adult has a constant height (approximately).
Which is not to say that parallel universes necessarily exist, of course. The Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, the main science you’ll hear referenced in relation to parallel universe, is (at least currently) nothing more than a philosophical attempt to resolve unpleasantness in the Copenhagen Interpretation. The math says that quantum systems evolve as a probability cloud until they are observed, at which point they collapse to one definite state, and this math works very well in practice, but the idea of collapse is terribly non-symmetric and ugly and raises deep questions about what constitutes an observation. Postulating that every possible outcome does happen, and we live in a quantum superposition of all possible timelines, removes the issue of collapse, but since we only subjectively experience one state within the superposition it’s unclear if it is even in principle possible to observe any evidence for or against this superposition.
Actually, it isn’t even that. Conservation of energy is a purely local restriction. It is technically stated as the integral of the energy flux across the border of a region of space time must be zero. In layman’s terms, that means that the difference between the energy in a region of space between time A and time B must be equal to the amount of energy that entered (or exited) the region over that time, with appropriate signs of course.
As for the total energy of the universe, empty space isn’t empty but contains quantum energy, which has a constant energy density. Since the universe is expanding, so is the total amount of quantum energy, so goodbye universal energy conservation.
The only time I use multiverse in my stories is to show how it could have been. Each “timeline” is a different draft of my story.
My take on parallel universes is that the universe you have grilled cheese and the one you don’t will merge back together at the point when the differences no longer matter. That’s why you often find your keys in unexpected places because you are now in a merged universe.
David R. Palmer used the same construction: https://www.baen.com/spe-cial-education.html
Pretty sure mating with an Otyugh would result in the STI to end all STI’s
> whipping around each other in storms that would make the troposphere of Jupiter look mild.
what forces are causing the storms?
j/k
I’m confused, if there are no parallel universes then how did Hope Corrigan enter into the Grrl-power-verse? For that matter how did I find this wonderful webcomic without Astra universe hoping through it and deciding I really like Sidney as a quirky super hero?