Annoy Mouse @70

Carl Sagan was positing a single universe of bilions of civilizations, and the slim to none chance of another civilization arriving at the brief moment of technology capable of communicating across vast distances at the same time we did. Sagan was right, those odds were and are daunting. But we are not talking here about Sagan’s single universe, but an infinite number of alternate/parallel universes, existing side by side, occupying the same space-time as ourselves. And you are quite correct, if there were alternate universes, traces would show up in ours as unexplainable incontinuities. And they have shown up, in double slit photon experiments for example, and what some people call ghosts for another. I have heard too many credible stories from credible people to totally dismiss the stories as fantasy, and so I tend to think that a ghost is simply an unexplainable incontinuity, where someone from a nearby alternate universe somehow bleeds into our universe, and is just as frightened and bewildered at encountering what would be to that person as an unexplainable incontinuity as we are at seeing what appears to be an apparition. Fanciful, I admit, and probably completely wrong, but if serious physicists believe there are an infinite number of alternate universes, and if, in an infinite universe, an infinite number of incontinuities is not only possible but certain, then somewhere in the infinity of universes everything that could possibly happen has already happened, is happening, or will happen. Even if that means in an infinite number of universes Obama was elected, the bright side is that in an infinite number of universes Obama was defeated. We are just infortunate to be in one of the unlucky universes.