The End of the World 2

If, as David Deutsch and his team at Oxford have proven, every branching timeline possible from this moment forward exists as potential within the probabilistic quantum wavefunction, and this is what creates the "bush-like branching structure" of potentially observed states from this moment on, then this ties in so very nicely to the concepts I've been presenting here with my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project: this means the branching fifth dimension of probability space our 4D line of time is being constructed from, as I describe in my book and my popular animation, would be that same idea presented in a simple-to-visualize metaphor. As most visitors to this blog will know, the set of potential branching timelines for our universe (and all other universes) is part of the concept known as the multiverse.

Here's one of the ideas I've had fun playing with regarding the multiverse: if every potential branch from this moment to the next exists within the currently unobserved branches ahead of us at this moment, and only one of those branches will be the one that we are about to individually witness, then this must be true no matter where in the timeline of the universe we care to think about. But if those other branches exist, does that mean there are versions of each of us who did end up observing some of the alternate branches of the multiverse which our current version believes did not happen? Here's some of what I say in my book about this idea:

It seems that no matter where you are in history, at a specific moment there will always be a certain small contingent of the population who are predicting the end of the world. Usually it’s some conveniently distant amount of time away from the present to be a cause for concern, but not so close as to immediately leave the person spreading the news with egg on their face (as I write this paragraph in 2006, the Mayan calendar’s December 21 2012 looks like a good upcoming contender for an end-of-the-world focal point some portion of the public are likely to become caught up with).
But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

So continuing on with this bit of fun, here is a video of me singing the most "campy" of all the 26 songs I've created for this project.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

THE END OF THE WORLD
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone

Looking back through history
We oft encounter prophecies
Of end times so very very near
Next year, five years, ten from now
A state of flux, some way somehow
The process of postponement never clear

The end of the world…

With space and time a continuum
Of everything that is to come
And might have been, in one infinite ball
Multiple timelines, now I see
Apocalyptic destinies
Prophets proven prophets after all

The saucers?
Already landed
Our star bodies?
Already attained
Y2K? The global pandemic?
Huge disasters
The big freakin’ asteroid?
Destroyed the world

The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone
The end of the world has come and gone