So, what's going on with that weird security dude? Well, you'll need to hop back over to pages 183 through 186 to see how that all played out. Unit 6120 is the security officer who had a hair-raising run-in with body-snatching mooner villain Woody. And unfortunately for Unit 6120 – as well as the Nova Dagon docking crew – Woody now has control over the security officer's body – and apparently she also now has access to the Control Room. Not good, suh. No, not good a'tall!
More on da way!
I'm sure we've all heard some version of this before: As the conjecture goes, if the universe is infinitely large, then if you travel far enough you'll run into an exact copy of yourself. In fact, cosmologist Max Tegmark even went so far as to calculate just how far the distance is you'd need to travel before you run into another you. That distance, in case you were curious, is 10(^10^29) meters. In fact, the entire observable universe, Tegmark suggests, should repeat itself every 10(^10^118) meters.
The logic is straightforward enough: There's only a limited number of combinations of matter (DNA, stellar material, etc.), so given an infinite volume of space, every combination of matter should be repeated an infinite number of times.
But is that actually true?
Personally, I doubt it. Infinity is always a problematic concept, and there are a lot of assumptions that go into Tegmark's conjecture that I find a bit sketchy. Ignoring that the universe probably is not infinitely large (though there may be an infinite number of universes), the argument hinges on the idea that our universe can be perfectly modeled based on probability. I think it's pretty safe to say that is not the case, at least based on current knowledge. Just take a look at the three body problem: our predictive apparatus breaks down just trying to predict the elementary motion of three simple objects. So what makes us think we can predict the motion of 10(^10^118) objects, much less that we can presume to model them as simple “coin toss” probabilities?
Also, an infinite set need not necessarily contain all possible combinations. Infinity does not mean “everything.” The obvious example: The set of available integers (whole numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.) is an infinite quantity, and yet nowhere in that set will you find any decimals, like 1.2 or 5.668. In fact, there's an infinite quantity of numbers that are not contained within the infinite set of integers! Infinities are not all inclusive. Some infinities are greater than others. They can be added and subtracted, and routinely are in some physics calculations.
I'm also pretty sure that Tegmark's calculation was for a “snapshot” universe. That is, he was calculating that an identical arrangement of matter would repeat itself eventually, not that every particle and every person would have the exact same timeline and history; that every atom in every star followed the exact same path to get where it is and all that. So even Tegmark's identical universes are only identical for one instantaneous snapshot in time before they diverge and everything goes in a different direction. The alternate identical version of Earth gets hit by a comet. The alternate version of me in another universe decides not to write this article. Boy, don't you wish you lived in that universe!
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