I've been similarly exhausted by the multiverse concept, and over the past 6 months or so have been doing a bit of creative writing to try to 'solve' the problem of multiverses as a narrative device. Basically my idea is that reality has causal mass, in the same way matter creates a gravity well. Like how in space, enough dust and rocks and such can be enough for their own gravity to act on each other and start to form a planetoid. When two bodies with their own gravity encounter each other, the one with less mass collapses into the one with more, and it takes a significant amount of energy, like momentum, to escape a gravity well. Rocks can form moons, planets can capture moons into stable orbits or pull them in entirely, planets orbit stars, stars orbit the galactic center, and so on, all based on which has the biggest mass and thus biggest gravity.
My idea is that reality works much the same way. This is why there actually aren't an infinite number of alternate universes, like ones where a single free neutron 100,000 LY away is in a different spot one Planck length in distance than in the next universe. Those realities have no causal mass, so they collapse back into their parent realities and cease to exist. Events need to be different enough to have enough causal mass to create their own reality that can break away from the parent one and become self sustaining. The bigger the event, the bigger the break away.
So the reason why in stories we see characters jump from one alternate reality to the next, but nearly everything is the same, even meeting alternate versions of themselves, except for one narrative-driven change, like the outcome of a war being different, is because those events were big enough to spin off an alternate reality, but they are still in orbit so to speak of the central reality they spun off from. All of the alternate realities where everyone is evil and has mustaches, or the Soviets won the Cold War, the usual stuff you see in an 'alternate universe' episode of a show, those are all casual bodies orbiting a central reality, but that itself is basically akin to a planet with a lot of moons. And that central reality is orbiting an even larger, more massive, reality, like one where the Sol system exists at all, which is orbiting another reality with even more casual mass, like the Milk Way existing at all, and so on.
The creative writing I'm doing isn't so much about the alternate realities we often see in sci-fi shows and movies per se, but about why those types of alternate realities are the ones we see in the first place. Why don't the characters jump through the portal or use the warp gate or whatever to jump to a reality where everything is exactly the same, except one carbon atom in one molecule in a single mosquito 10 million years ago was slightly different? Mathematically those changes should be way more common than jumping to an alternate universe and stumbling upon the one where the alien invasion was successful and Humans are a slave species on earth now.
Because those realities collapse and annihilated because they weren't different enough. You can only jump to ones that are different enough to have been able to self-sustain, and the difference itself is what gives it the causal mass to self-sustain and keep existing. So no, there aren't an infinite number of the same person you can just pull from one reality to another if they die. Their death probably isn't different enough in the grand scale to sustain its own reality, so when you die, you die in all of the local reality orbits.
I'm still working on how to turn it into a short story and not just a sic-fi idea, but that's what I've been spending some of my free time on over the past couple of months.
I've been similarly exhausted by the multiverse concept, and over the past 6 months or so have been doing a bit of creative writing to try to 'solve' the problem of multiverses as a narrative device. Basically my idea is that reality has causal mass, in the same way matter creates a gravity well. Like how in space, enough dust and rocks and such can be enough for their own gravity to act on each other and start to form a planetoid. When two bodies with their own gravity encounter each other, the one with less mass collapses into the one with more, and it takes a significant amount of energy, like momentum, to escape a gravity well. Rocks can form moons, planets can capture moons into stable orbits or pull them in entirely, planets orbit stars, stars orbit the galactic center, and so on, all based on which has the biggest mass and thus biggest gravity.
My idea is that reality works much the same way. This is why there actually aren't an infinite number of alternate universes, like ones where a single free neutron 100,000 LY away is in a different spot one Planck length in distance than in the next universe. Those realities have no causal mass, so they collapse back into their parent realities and cease to exist. Events need to be different enough to have enough causal mass to create their own reality that can break away from the parent one and become self sustaining. The bigger the event, the bigger the break away.
So the reason why in stories we see characters jump from one alternate reality to the next, but nearly everything is the same, even meeting alternate versions of themselves, except for one narrative-driven change, like the outcome of a war being different, is because those events were big enough to spin off an alternate reality, but they are still in orbit so to speak of the central reality they spun off from. All of the alternate realities where everyone is evil and has mustaches, or the Soviets won the Cold War, the usual stuff you see in an 'alternate universe' episode of a show, those are all casual bodies orbiting a central reality, but that itself is basically akin to a planet with a lot of moons. And that central reality is orbiting an even larger, more massive, reality, like one where the Sol system exists at all, which is orbiting another reality with even more casual mass, like the Milk Way existing at all, and so on.
The creative writing I'm doing isn't so much about the alternate realities we often see in sci-fi shows and movies per se, but about why those types of alternate realities are the ones we see in the first place. Why don't the characters jump through the portal or use the warp gate or whatever to jump to a reality where everything is exactly the same, except one carbon atom in one molecule in a single mosquito 10 million years ago was slightly different? Mathematically those changes should be way more common than jumping to an alternate universe and stumbling upon the one where the alien invasion was successful and Humans are a slave species on earth now.
Because those realities collapse and annihilated because they weren't different enough. You can only jump to ones that are different enough to have been able to self-sustain, and the difference itself is what gives it the causal mass to self-sustain and keep existing. So no, there aren't an infinite number of the same person you can just pull from one reality to another if they die. Their death probably isn't different enough in the grand scale to sustain its own reality, so when you die, you die in all of the local reality orbits.
I'm still working on how to turn it into a short story and not just a sic-fi idea, but that's what I've been spending some of my free time on over the past couple of months.