down to the fact that there's nobody else like me out there," Brahma said. "So thank you for just existing."
"Oh. I—well girls are gross but I do like video games. I think I feel the same way," the boy said. "It's been really cool meeting everybody and having a look over the ship. It's awesome. And being the center of attention is pretty cool too, but I don't think you guys can play babysitter to me for any length of time and I really want to get to Earth-978. Bye guys."
Everybody at the pub waved except for Golem. He was pouring a specially crafted brew of intelligence inhibitors down his fuel drain.
The boy vanished in a swirl of light.
"Good luck," Brahma said, and Colonel Dart nodded.
Ensign Brahma smelled the Cherenkov radiation. He tasted the hyperspace wake the boy left by hurtling through space. He assimilated his crudely replicated stout beer through an elaborate atomic process. But he didn't feel alone anymore.
On the Creation of the Multiple Earths
[From Mr. Ambrogax's Science Class, Third Grade, Antonio Beauchamp Primary School, Earth-1, France]
Yesterday you learned about the most incredible discovery Captain John Fry made during his illustrious career. It was the dawn of the Age of Exploration. The first time mankind set out to really map the stars and all the strange phenomenon out there. And Captain John Fry discovered a truly bizarre mystery... an exact duplicate of his Earth.
In the two hundred years since then the Galactic Union has identified more than eleven hundred Earth duplicates, including the reclassification of planets Athenia and Sparta and four duplicates of the Gamar home world.
Most of these worlds seem to be exact duplicates of Earth-1's history, except they split off at a specific point. Some worlds are dominated by other strange cultures. Earth-2 at the time of it's discovery was under the thrall of a technologically advanced version of ancient Rome.
Since then many scientists have been working to explain how so many duplicates of one planet could arise in the universe, but so far nobody has come close to proving the truth.
The Progenitor Hypothesis
The most obvious explanation, at least to my aural detection feelers, is that a technologically advanced race created these duplicate Earths. There are mountains of evidence about previous civilizations across our galaxy, both on duplicate Earths and other planets. Unfortunately none of these civilizations had the technological sophistication to craft a planet, as far as we know.
Another place this explanation falls flat is that the most powerful energy-being on record, the entity that destroyed the entire Lyzardess Civilization, could only atomically generate the mass and complexity equivalent of a starship in about two hours, so to create just an Earth it would take the entity 2,737.8507 Earth years to construct a full size Earth and forget about the rest of the solar system.
But it could do it. And if it wanted to spend nearly three thousand years doing so, energy beings are generally thought of as ageless.
The Anthropic Principal Hypothesis
Anthropic Principal is the philosophical concept that the universe was created with the primary aim of developing intelligent life. Out of the various explanations, this is by far the most popular one.
It can be surmised that if the Anthropic Principal is true then the Earth must be a nearly perfect environment for developing intelligent life. As such, the very laws of the universe will more often than not create an Earth-like system when it is even slightly likely for an Earth-like system to arise.
The primary problem with this hypothesis is that while Earths have been discovered around more than a thousand stars complete with duplicates of the other fifteen planets, the stars themselves only resemble each other in that they're yellow main sequence stars.
The youngest star to bear an Earth-like system has been in it's main sequence for only four-hundred thousand years. On the other end of the spectrum it's hard to speculate how many Earths have been swallowed when their suns transformed into red giants. The denizens of Earth-287 escaped just such a fate when the Starship Columbia refilled their sun's core with hydrogen. One would presume that if the Anthropic Principal hypothesis were correct that these Earths and other planets would be formed at the same time as their attendant suns.
But there's something comforting about the idea that the universe wants us to exist, so the Anthropic Principal hypothesis persists.
The Hyperspace Echo Hypothesis
This last explanation relies on the fact that many starships while out exploring the galaxy have encountered hyperspace anomalies that can split living beings into two exact duplicates. Captain John Fry himself during his tenure as a starship captain was duplicated and recombined more than a dozen times.
This idea is backed up by the fact that many of these Earths represent one aspect of the hypothetical main-line Earth, a world who's culture is dominated by ancient Sparta, a gangster world, and so on. And most of the time when a being is split by one of these hyperspace anomalies it is along conceptual lines, one duplicate who is good, the other who is evil, one duplicate who is brave, the other cowardly, etc.
Indeed, this explanation goes a long way toward explaining why the Evil Empire exists between Earth-5, Sparta-2, Athenia-3 and Gamarlon-2.
However the current physics explanation as to how these hyperspace anomalies work sets a hard limit on the item duplicated at about 20,000,000 kilograms, far smaller than even the smallest planet, let alone an entire planetary system.
. . .
There are several other hypotheses that are far from mainstream. One states that our universe is a computer program running on a larger computer in another universe and the Earths represent a memory allocation error. Another particularly crack pot idea is that the alternate Earths are illusions and the minds of intelligent beings can't handle the truly alien worlds that exist, so they've imagined duplicated iconography over the completely alien creatures and symbols and the aliens have done likewise.
Thus far all the tests of these hypothesis have proven inconclusive. Perhaps some day we will learn the truth, but for now we must be content to wonder about the possibilities.
###
About the Author
Joey Peters is a writer, cartoonist and beauty contest champion from Boston. His work has appeared in the Boston Phoenix, Leftovers of the Living Dead, Inbound: Comics from Boston, and all across the internet.
You can follow him at Tacolicious.net.
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