i think the other things thats weird is what happens when there are things that cannot exist across multiple states.
like its easy to have a day at home where you lie on the couch thinking about flying, or reading comic books. at the end of the day, your body is exactly the same, the house is exactly the same.
if you can think back and not remember the exact day, you cant remember when or if you'd read that particular book. you can't remember if you spent that day thinking about flying and running scenarios in your head. so when you need that information, you've got it from either multiverse stream (for example).
but if you make a concrete change in a day, it may take a while to undo that change.
like say you try to fix something on the digger and you break it, and it takes a few weeks to order the replacement part and get the digger to work again. thats a branch that lasts longer and is harder to merge.
and then what if someone drops a nuclear bomb on your city (like hiroshima or nagasaki).
and what about organisms that live and die.
theres obviously an extent to which there is a physical rearrangement of atoms between multiverses that is harder to reconcile.
in galactic timescales they're all the same. unless we leave earth, we're all gonna be swallowed up by the sun, and whether i lay on the couch reading megahex (god i hate the cat) or doing admin isn't going to fundamentally change the structure of the sun as it gobbles up our planet.
oh.
i guess thats why elon tries so hard to get us off the planet. we have the ability to make decisions and change things. and if we dont take the path that we get off the planet and away from here, then its very easy for us to get gobbled back up by big energetic processes.
whether thats just complex systems tending to burn themselves out (climate change breaking our human-friendly ecology), hard to predict asteroids being swept into our gravity well, biological systems being hard to predict and highly competitive (viruses nerfing us), or in the long term the sun coming to nom us up.
like maybe the great filter is that its hard to change the universe, and that this 5th dimension wants to collapse back to the simplest version of us. you have to constantly put energy into changing things, making decisions and creating multiple outcomes. otherwise the universe tends to turn you back into a homogenous blob.
which is weird, because coral reefs are so diverse, forests are so varied.
but they're not intentional from the point of view of a human. like i think a forest is more beautiful than my bedroom wall, but my bedroom wall is unlikely on the surface of the earth, and forests grow everywhere.
and you can sit on this computer and build something that will make a fortune that can pay a thousand people to build a baryon accelerator and you can use that to make antimatter you stick in a probe to get to the next star system.
forests can inspire a hairless monkey to build a website that builds a particle accelerator that builds a probe to send a seed from that tree to the next star system, but a tree cant do it directly. it cant generate enough energy in its cells to shoot something fast enough.
well. you say that. but a tree can just fucking hang out and hope that it gets ossified, then an asteroid smashes into earth, knocks that bit of tree into space, and it lands a zillion years later in the next star system and its managed to preserve itself such as that some parts of its biology can restart and reseed that next system (eg martian/earth transfers in the past).
like if humans are fast at making changes in the universe and we can make changes across the universe, then we're a high-w thing. we're something that can move atoms around quickly, we can change the shape of our world, and those changes will take a long time to revert if we stopped using energy to keep those changes apart.
like theres two ways to live your life.
one where you make big changes to the world that will take a long time to undo, and one where you make big changes inside your head but make a small impact on the atoms of the world.
you can leave behind books and ideas, or you can leave behind trillions of tonnes of co2 in the atmosphere. they're kind of different ideas.
the thing is - if the physical changes you decide to make to the world, if they're a good idea, then you did an excellent thing. but what if the physical change you made was wrong? you'd really want to make sure you're doing the right thing.
like the dude that added lead to fuel, or the people that argue that we should continue emitting carbon into the atmosphere, or me wanting to convert the methanex plant to running on electrolysers, what if they're the wrong idea.
hmmm ok so thats interesting. what if you come up with an idea that is a bad idea?
what if its not just atoms that can take a long time to reconcile back to a low energy state. what if peoples ideas can take a long time to re-coalesce.
what if the bad ideas that zuckerberg/musk/murdoch have developed (making people angry at each other to grow their own wealth) take just as much work to clean up as a nuclear meltdown or a agricultural disaster.
like if you have a huge mycological network under the soil that can think in a more complex way than us, and it has two seperate competing systems of thought, do they...
hmm no, because you can be of two states of mind, you can think x is good and y is good and if its just thinking and all versions of your brain can talk to itself, then you can change your mind instantly.
like we could all wake up tomorrow and there is an AI uprising or Ebola is everywhere or Aliens landed and we'd all instantly be on team pro-humanity.
Ideas just don't move as many atoms as dump trucks do.