MovieChat Forums > Parallels (2015) Discussion > The unlikelihood that you would meet you...

The unlikelihood that you would meet yourself on any other parallel Eart

posted 9 years ago by tonycom5
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I understand suspension of disbelief and don't have any real issue with the facts that I'm about to discuss, but I think it's worthy of mention. There are a couple of ways to approach a potential series of stories possible from this type of story. One is to go to worlds where another version of you is living a different life. There were three different versions of the Asian girl that went along for the ride to each new world, which is something the writers were developing in some way. They all looked exactly the same, had the same personality (more or less). It was like they were exact carbon copies, born and raised under very similar circumstances.

But if, for a moment, we were to consider the different possibilities that any end result might happen on any world, it is very unlikely that there would be more than one of anyone in more than one world. And even if there were a copy of one's self, it's highly improbable that they would be dating or interested in the very same person from another world, as the nerdy lawyer did in two different worlds (at least).

In the first visited world, there had been a nuclear war. There were characters present from different worlds, most notably the copy who had the same exact name as he did on our Earth (assuming the original Earth in the story *was* our Earth, wouldn't *that* be an interesting twist!). But for there to be exact duplicates on more than one world, this follows that each had the same parents, going back to the beginning of time. But circumstances would likely be different and it wouldn't take anything necessarily drastic (like a nuclear war) to change something as simple as who is born. Say Mom and Dad back five generations never met (because they never crossed paths), that means one child is never born and that child never being born would change the entire lineage so that Officer Stone would never exist.

Now, I know that the Asian girl mentioned there are so many worlds, many of which are weird in how similar they might be to your original one, and how one might be exactly the same except for having one less mosquito. So, very likely in the first visited world, it was exactly like millions of other Earths, except that there had been a nuclear war and Kansas was split geopolitically into East and West or North and South. And so, perhaps my points are invalidated. On the other hand, this type of idea has vast potential and never mind it being optioned into a series. It could (in my opinion), in fact it *should* be the vehicle for an entirely new vehicle for a science fiction plot: the device that does not send you into the past or future (a time machine) but one in which sends you to a parallel universe or Earth.

And just like thousands of writers over the years have offered their own ideas in various stories among the many different sci fi vehicles (invisibility, time travel, etc.), this would be another in which different writers would have different approaches and multiple amazing stories to tell.

In fact, if this series were ever picked up, I'm sure there would be some episodes where some Earths were visited that would be terrifyingly different than our own -- perhaps landing in a place where some Lovecraftian nightmare exists or that big huge cockroaches roam the planet. Or humans speak an entirely different language or they speak our language but with a weird kind of accent.

This was a ninety minute movie and poetic license must always be taken. I'm just saying that if there were so many infinite worlds out there, it would be unlikely that any one of them would have anything close to our own. If our own Earth were to be replayed from various times (from the age of the dinosaurs, from the Second World War, from the time of Caesar), a million times, there would be a million different vastly different end results. Languages would develop differently, for example.

I'm not saying that anything that was done in this movie annoyed me. It, I think, was innovative and original and, hopefully, created a new sort of device that other writers can build upon in their own works -- the parallel universe transport machine.

[–] Caribbean_Smurf 9 years ago

Say Mom and Dad back five generations never met (because they never crossed paths), that means one child is never born and that child never being born would change the entire lineage so that Officer Stone would never exist.

Not just one lineage, but everybody from the new lineages they start with other partners would subtly affect the lives of millions of other people, causing millions of other people to not be born.

I like to bring this up when people start the 'would you kill Hitler if you could go back in time' discussion. Killing Hitler would snuff 90% of the current world population out of existence. The moment of conception for any human being is so fragile. The average ejaculation contains close to 100 million sperm - if the timing is even a second off, another one than the original one WILL win the race and a different person will take your place in the world. No Hitler would change the world history so dramatically that everybody on the planet would be affected, do things differently, and have different children at different times.

[–] tonycom5 9 years ago

Exactly, the smallest pebble (if the world were to be replayed from any point) would, over time, cause the most significant changes. I will allow for the suspension of disbelief so that the travelers can go to worlds that are essentially the same, but in truth, it would be ridiculous if, without fail, over hundreds of visits, the biggest changes were a nuclear war happening in the 20th century and Kansas being broken into North and West. If I would write an episode, I'd love to visit a world where the language spoken is English but with very odd accents or perhaps people don't speak at all but use an odd sort of sign language.

[–] mobocracy 9 years ago

Maybe I'm under-thinking this, but isn't there a form of the parallel universe concept where there are near infinite parallel worlds, with every possible variation resulting in a parallel universe?

Usually when I've read about this style of parallel universe, there's kind of a minimum amount of "horizontal" travel required to get to parallel universes with significant deviation from the universe you're in. Adjacent worlds may only deviate by whether you had bacon or sausage with your breakfast and otherwise there's no meaningful deviation.

In these cases, meeting your doppelganger seems likely because the cause/effect chain is so similar that there's not any meaningful difference. What I eat for breakfast is unlikely affect the course of even my own history, let alone world history or the evolution of civilization.

I think a lot of time (at least in stories about this kind of thing) there's also a kind of larger series of cause and effects that carry more weight. We all make trivial choices that really don't change anything long term. Sometimes the literature holds that even making what would seem to be big changes doesn't change the outcome.

One example is the killing of JFK. I read a book called "Replay" where a guy is caught in a Groundhog Day kind of situation where he "dies" and immediately goes back to his life at age 18, exactly as it was then. In one of his lives, he manages to get Oswald arrested the day before Kennedy was killed, but as it turns out, Kennedy gets killed anyway. The idea being that there was some kind of historical inevitability to kill Kennedy, and stopping even the guy who supposedly did it doesn't prevent it from happening.

In that same book, in one of his lives the lead character makes a huge fortune investing in companies that became huge by the time (in his mid-40s) he "dies" and the looping started. He manages to own/control a number of these and even introduces major technology several years before it would have occurred in his first lifetime, yet the course of major events seldom changes. The only time it *does* change is in one lifetime where he makes a bunch of public predictions and gets hijacked by the government and the government does a bunch of radical foreign policy maneuvers which really does change history.