Own Your Own Universe: Buyer Beware of Fakes

Ronald Bailey | July 28, 2008

For the credulous person who has everything--why not a title deed to their own universe? If we live in a multiverse in which every possible outcome to every event splits the universe into two universes following their own separate time-lines, then there must be a nearly infinite number of universes.

So these enterprising folks are offering title deeds to your very own universe. You scoff. But as they explain, if all possible universes exist, then surely one for which you hold the deed must also exist and so you are in fact its owner. Sample deed below.

Too good to be true? Well, physicist Paul Davies points out that there is the problem of simulated universes.

Among the myriad universes similar to ours will be some in which technological civilizations advance to the point of being able to simulate consciousness. Eventually, entire virtual worlds will be created inside computers, their conscious inhabitants unaware that they are the simulated products of somebody else's technology. For every original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds -- some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of their own, and so on ad infinitum.

Taking the multiverse theory at face value, therefore, means accepting that virtual worlds are more numerous than ''real'' ones. There is no reason to expect our world -- the one in which you are reading this right now -- to be real as opposed to a simulation.

 

So you just might be getting a deed to a fake universe.