Dreams & Nightmares

Religion may well be an evolutionary response to human self-consciousness. It may not be entirely satisfying and it certainly has not provided any definitive explanations for the profound injustices in this world that privilege some people with enormous advantages and riches and condemn far many more to poverty and desperation. The best religion can offer believers is the faith that God works in mysterious ways and that the good bookkeeper in the sky is keeping tally and will settle all accounts in the afterlife.

For millennia that basic doctrine powering various religions has provided relief enough. The universe is surely mysterious; human existence could be wrapped in its riddle too. The other alternative — accepting that it all ends here and that the terrible unfairness and injustice surrounding us will remain unsettled — is far too painful and disheartening to contemplate. Even so, in truth, the vast majority of even the most fervent believers live their life with precisely that creed. Religion is a palliative or a side bet, just in case….

But what if death were really not the end and there were indeed alternative outcomes and histories for the events occurring around us. Imagine a world in which every injustice has been righted. Imagine a world in which every winner is a loser and every loser a winner. Imagine worlds where every one of your dreams or nightmares is realized. Imagine worlds where the dead are alive and the alive dead. Imagine what you have ever imagined and then imagine some more. Imagine that it is all real. And real now, at this very instant. How beautiful is that?

That potentially is the world of the multiverse. One of the hottest ideas in contemporary cosmology and physics, multiverse theorists postulate that our infinite universe, which is populated by infinite galaxies is just one among infinite universes. Infinite not just as in very large, but truly infinite, as in never ending. In this infinite universe, these theorists contend, there are an infinite number of identical copies of our own universe acting out every conceivable probability. Many worlds in which Barack Obama is president and others in which John McCain is, or even, horror of horrors, Sarah Palin is. More excitingly, worlds where you, dear reader, is president of the United States, or better yet, I am.

In laboratories and observatories around the world, physicists and cosmologists are toying with other theories of parallel universes separated by the minutest membranes present right here, right now in your living room. They are exploring theories of additional dimensions that shape and condition the three spatial dimensions and time that our senses and instruments perceive and even universes sequenced in time like beads on a string.

Some day theories of the multiverse may yield satisfying secular answers to our most enduring existential questions on life, justice and afterlife. It may well turn out that we exist in perpetuity in other worlds or dimensions living every combination of circumstances that we can contemplate.

What a wonderful possibility! Or, if you really think about it, is it really?