Enter The Alternate Timeline

Today we travel to a future that’s actually the present, just a little bit different. That’s right, this week we’re visiting parallel universes!

Guests:

• Dr. Sean Carroll — professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology & host of the podcast Sean Carroll’s Mindscape
• Dr. Charan Ranganath — professor of psychology at UC Davis
• Tom, Matt, and Nate — twins!
• Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone — co-authors of This Is How You Lose the Time War

Further Reading:

• Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast
• Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
• The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett
• Collective representations elicit widespread individual false memories
• Can fabricated evidence induce false eyewitness testimony?
• The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain
• How Curiosity Enhances Hippocampus-Dependent Memory: The Prediction, Appraisal, Curiosity, and Exploration (PACE) Framework
• The movie that doesn’t exist and the Redditors who think it does
• This Crazy Conspiracy Theory About “The Berenstein Bears” Will Blow Your Mind
• This Is How You Lose the Time War (Bonus: Join the Futurology Book Club to read along with us!)

Episode Sponsors:

• PNAS Science Sessions: Science Sessions are short, in-depth conversations with the world’s top scientific researchers. Listen and subscribe to Science Sessions on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
• Shaker & Spoon: A subscription cocktail service that helps you learn how to make hand-crafted cocktails right at home. Get $20 off your first box at shakerandspoon.com/ffwd.
• Tab for a Cause: A browser extension that lets you raise money for charity while doing your thing online. Whenever you open a new tab, you’ll see a beautiful photo and a small ad. Part of that ad money goes toward a charity of your choice! Join team Advice For And From The future by signing up at tabforacause.org/flashforward.
• Tavour: Tavour is THE app for fans of beer, craft brews, and trying new and exciting labels. You sign up in the app and can choose the beers you’re interested in (including two new ones DAILY) adding to your own personalized crate. Use code: flashforward for $10 off after your first order of $25 or more. 
• Purple Carrot: Purple Carrot is THE plant-based subscription meal kit that makes it easy to cook irresistible meals to fuel your body. Each week, choose from an expansive and delicious menu of dinners, lunches, breakfasts, and snacks! Get $30 off your first box by going to www.purplecarrot.com and entering code FLASH at checkout today! Purple Carrot, the easiest way to eat more plants! 

Flash Forward is hosted by Rose Eveleth and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. The voices from the future this episode were provided by 

If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at info@flashforwardpod.com. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! Head to www.flashforwardpod.com/support for more about how to give. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

That’s all for this future, come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

▹▹ TRANSCRIPT ▹▹

(by Emily White of The Wordary)

FLASH FORWARD

S6E20 – “Enter the Alternate Timeline”

[Flash Forward intro music – “Whispering Through” by Asura, an electronic, rhythm-heavy piece]

ROSE EVELETH:
Hello and welcome to the final episode of the season for Flash Forward. And buckle up, because it is a doozy. If you are new here, this is Flash Forward; it’s a podcast, about the future. I’m your host, Rose Eveleth. Every episode we consider a possible future. Well, usually. But on this episode, we are not exactly considering possible futures, as much as possible presents. Possible timelines. That’s right, you asked for it (a lot), and today, to end the season, we are talking about parallel universes. Alternate dimensions. Other versions of this world where you exist but you took a left turn at Albuquerque, or married Brad, or quit that job and moved to Cambodia.

The only real question we still have as we sit at this crossroads between two worlds, is whether to go left or right. Thankfully, I don’t actually have to pick. Instead, I’m going to use a trick I learned from Dr. Sean Carroll, an astrophysicist you’ll hear from in a little bit, and pull up an app called Universe Splitter. This is a real thing, by the way. And when I hit this “Split Universe” button, the app will send a signal to a laboratory in Geneva, which will send a photon down a beam, and that photon will be split, and the app will tell us which way we should go. Ready? Let’s do it.

[universe-traveling, time-warp bwooms]

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

ROSE (dramatic, with gravitas):
They say the path to happiness is being true to yourself. Being inside yourself. Like a small nesting doll, within a doll, within a doll. Do all of those dolls have hair and teeth, do you think? Of course. They are clones of you, inside you… but are any of us really inside of ourselves at all? Welcome to Flash Forward.

[haunting piano music with spooky, urgent electro-beat]

It’s a big day here in Flash Forward, but of course I don’t have to tell you that. I’m sure you’ve noticed it on your town-issued calendars that hang in your homes, to the left of the fridge. Always, to the left. I’m sure you’ve noticed that on the little square where today’s date lives is a hovering, glowing dot. Perhaps you’ve caught it pulsing, with excitement of course. Because today is the day that the town comes together and decides which path to take. It’s New Universe Day! A day of splitting. Of rendering. Of making new.

Behind us, a long straight path; one decision leading to the next. But ahead of us, oh, a labyrinth. And today we choose which way to turn, which path to go, which world to enter. As of course you know, this choice is a collective one, but this year there are some new rules about the voting process after last year’s… unfortunate incident with the Brenners and their dog.

So to avoid a repeat of that, the mayor of Flash Forward has instituted new rules. As usual, each citizen will gather in the town square at 11:35 am. As usual, you will each bring with you the glowing dot from your calendars. A tip, offered by the head of ceremonies this year, is that if you’re having trouble with your dot, you might consider wrapping it in a small blanket or tea towel. You can tell it is still in there by the warmth it gives off. But please, avoid using polyester, as the dots can catch synthetic fibers on fire.

[tense orchestral music fades in]

As always, you will bring your dots to the town square at 11:35, but, this year, to avoid any accidental cleaving of any individual person or animal between two universes, there is a new protocol. Residents whose last names begin with A through L will stand on the South side of the street. Residents whose names begin with N through Z will stand on the North side. Those with letters in between, will be on their own.

[suspenseful electronic beat begins]

At precisely noon you will release your dots, let them pulse and combine, rise towards the sky; fizzle and split and rend, grabbing onto the fabric of spacetime and pulling, pulling, pulling, us all. [voice overlaps and morphs into another] Ripping and shredding and uniting and ultimately melding us all with the universe for a brief and glorious moment before we land, again.

[back to original voice, music shifts to peaceful]

Here.
In the center of town.
Together.
And ready to travel onward, in this new world, until next time.

[all music fades out]

And now, the weather.

NEW SKETCH BEGINS

[perky acoustic guitar music]

[doorbell rings]

HOST:
Marianne and Noor are newlyweds and looking for a new adventure to mark the next stage of their lives.

MARIANNE (mono):
I really want our first year to feel special.

HOST:
Marianne wants to get as far away from home as possible, while Noor would like to stay close to Earth, where her family lives.

NOOR (mono):
I just don’t know if I’m ready to be two space stations away from my parents. That just feels too far.

HOST:
But location isn’t the only thing they disagree about.

NOOR:
I want something with all the amenities. If I’m going to live in space, I want a pool, and a zoo, and a movie theatre. I want everything I could have on Earth.

MARIANNE:
But the point is that we’re not on Earth! I want to feel like I’m in space, on an adventure.

NOOR:
The food on adventures is never good!

HOST:
And to help them find the right place, space estate agent Natalie is on the case. But it won’t be easy.

NATALIE (mono):
Marianne and Noor are a great couple, they’re dear friends, and I have no idea how I’m going to get them to agree on anything.

HOST:
The first place she takes them to will satisfy Noor’s wish list, but it might be a no-go for Marianne.

NATALIE (on-site):
Welcome to ArcBlue! The unit here is a two bed, one bath, with really nice big porthole windows. This ship has three different restaurants, a zero-G water park, and a space petting zoo, which is really hard to find these days.

MARIANNE (on-site):
Ugh this feels like a cruise ship.

NOOR (on-site):
I mean it basically is. That’s what spaceships are, babe.

MARIANNE:
Noooo! Spaceships are way cooler! Anybody could live here, and we could be anywhere on Earth.

NOOR:
Uh, except we are floating and you can literally see Earth out the window.

MARIANNE:
It just doesn’t have that ‘space’ personality I was looking for.

HOST:
The next place is more Marianne’s style, but it might be just too much for Noor.

NOOR:
Oh my god, is this even safe?

MARIANNE:
What do you mean, of course it’s safe!

NOOR:
You can’t have kids in here, we can barely fit. These buttons are so low, they’re going to wind up ejecting us by accident.

NATALIE:
None of those are an eject button, I promise. This unit does require a little imagination, but there’s great history here. This is actually the first station that was approved for long-term living beyond Earth’s orbit.

MARIANNE:
That’s amazing! That’s history!

NOOR:
No it’s just old. This is old. This is, like, literally space junk. I don’t want to live in history, I want to live in a place that’s good for living. We’re not Laika!

MARIANNE:
Oh my gosh, is this the original trash compactor?

NOOR (mono):
The thing about Marianne is that she loves the idea of all of this stuff, the history of it, but she doesn’t think about what it’s going to be like to actually live here.

NOOR (on-site):
Does this ship have a hospital?

NATALIE:
It does not, you’d have to transfer over to Alioth for that. It’s not far though.

NOOR:
We’ve talked about having kids, and if I get pregnant, I don’t want to wind up shipping back and forth to another station.

NATALIE:
You’d have to plan for that, right now they don’t let infants under 6 months travel so you’d have to stay over on Alioth for a while after you give birth.

NOOR:
It just doesn’t make sense.

MARIANNE:
But then when you came back we would have such a cool place! Look, look! This is the original 3D printer model.

NOOR:
Oh my god. Who cares?

HOST:
Noor and Marianne will have to make a decision between history and practicality.

[music up]

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
Okay, so let’s start by defining what it means to talk about parallel universes. Like, what are we actually talking about here? While mortals like you and me might throw around phrases like ‘parallel universes’, ‘alternate timelines’, ‘other worlds’, or ‘other dimensions’, in physics all of those things have actual meanings and are pretty different, and some of them are more possible than others. When it comes to talking about some kind of other world, separate from ours, there are two things you could be talking about in physics land. The first is what physicists call a ‘cosmological multiverse‘.

DR. SEAN CARROLL:
The basic idea here is: it’s not even really a multiverse. It’s just that there are regions of space very, very far away where conditions are incredibly different, so different that they might as well be thought of as a different universe.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Sean Carroll, who I mentioned before. He’s a theoretical physicist at Caltech and the Santa Fe Institute, and also the host of a podcast called Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.

And when Sean says that these other regions of space are very, very far away, that actually also has a physics meaning.

SEAN:
We look out into space, and when we look at objects far away, we see them not only far away, but also in the past because it takes time for light to get to us. And we have a big bang 14 billion years ago that is, you know, as far as we can see, right? That’s as far as we can see into the past. So, there’s a horizon around us, past which is literally impossible for us to see. So when we say that there are regions of space far away, we mean so far away that we can literally not see them at all.

ROSE:
So it’s possible that in these unseeable regions of space, things are so different that they might as well be considered a different universe entirely. But there’s another version of the colloquial parallel universe thing that I think is actually more like what people tend to mean when they talk about parallel universes in regular life… because I’m sure that you and your friends are constantly talking about parallel universes in your day-to-day lives.

SEAN:
This other idea called the many worlds of quantum mechanics is almost as far away as possible as it is to be from the cosmological multiverse, although it still involves lots of universes.

ROSE:
Okay listeners. We are about to talk about quantum mechanics. And I have to confess to you that, even though this episode gets requested A LOT, I’ve put it off for… years at this point, because I don’t understand quantum mechanics. I can read about it, I can tell you about it, I can repeat the words, I can explain Schrödinger’s cat to you. But at the end of the day, I do not fundamentally understand what the heck is happening with quantum mechanics. You know when you have a really old computer, and you open too many things on it, and the fans start to get really, really loud and it kind of sounds like an airplane taking off? That’s basically my brain for most of what you’re about to hear. Just a warning.

Okay, so on to quantum mechanics.

[frightened horses whinnying]

Let’s start with an electron. A tiny little thing that zooms around the atom, right? No. According to quantum mechanics: wrong.

SEAN:
When you visualize it, it’s supposed to be like a point, right? But quantum mechanics says: no, no, no. The electron is a wave. It’s spread out. It has sort of a profile. And the wave is higher in some regions of space and lower in other regions of space.

ROSE:
So imagine, basically, a bell curve, and that curve represents all the places that the electron could be, and the probability of finding it there. So in the middle, where the hump is tall, there’s a higher likelihood that the electron is there than in the places in the little tail ends of that curve.

Okay, great in theory. But if you observe an electron, if you take a powerful detection device and you watch how it behaves, it doesn’t act like a wave or a distribution. It acts like a thing at a point. So what is going on here?

SEAN:
This is the thing that separates quantum mechanics from every other theory ever invented in the history of science. It says that “What there is when you’re not looking at it is different than what you see when you look at it.”

ROSE:
Quantum mechanics says that there is no way to predict exactly where the electron will be along that distribution. The very act of looking, of observing it, actually changes its condition.

SEAN:
This is obviously very disturbing if you’re a physicist, because what do you mean by ‘measure or observe’? Does this, like, involve consciousness? Or would a video camera…? All these questions are just completely unanswered.

ROSE (on call):
Can an AI observe something?

SEAN:
Yeah. The answer… if you ask questions like that in your sophomore quantum mechanics class, you fail. You’re told to leave the room, that we’re not supposed to ask what it means. We’re just supposed to ask what to calculate.

ROSE (Mono):
But there are some answers here. And one of them leads us to parallel universes.

SEAN:
But you know, certain ordinary people have said, “No, I actually want to know what it means, what we’re talking about here.” And one idea, which was handed to us by this guy named Hugh Everett in the 1950s, was that wave that the electron was before you measured doesn’t just disappear.

ROSE:
No, no. Instead of disappearing, it does basically the opposite.

SEAN:
What Everett says is: every single possible measurement outcome comes true when you make that measurement, but they all come true in separate universes. So if you measure the electron here at one location, someone else, another copy of you in a different universe, measured it somewhere else. And for all the different possible outcomes, they all correspond to separate universes.

ROSE:
Everett theorized that every time a quantum transition happens, new universes are created that are almost exact copies of this one. Now, what is a quantum transition? Surely those can’t happen, like, all the time, right? Wrong!

SEAN:
Those things happen billions of times a second.

ROSE:
In fact, inside our own body, these quantum processes are happening, constantly creating universes left and right.

SEAN:
In your body, there are radioactive atoms. Something like 5,000 times per second there’s a radioactive decay in your body. And those radioactive decays, you know, spit out a particle, and that particle interacts with the particles around it, and they become entangled with the rest of the world. So just the radioactive processes in your body split the universe into multiple copies 5,000 times a second.

ROSE:
You literally are (at least in this version of physics) a creator of worlds. Thousands of worlds a second!

SEAN:
So there’s a lot of universes being created all over the place. And they’re not even located anywhere! When you say, like, “Where are these universes…”

ROSE (on call):
That was my question! Are they, like… Where is it? Does it take up space?

SEAN:
There is no such thing because space, where things are located, right? Space exists within each universe. The universes don’t exist within space. They’re just literally parallel, simultaneously existing without having what you would call a location in space.

ROSE (Mono):
Okay, once again, cue Rose brain overheating sound. And the most ridiculous thing about this is that this is actually, in some ways, the simplest solution to this conundrum at the heart of quantum mechanics.

SEAN:
In some very real sense, Everett’s proposal was not to take quantum mechanics and add a bunch of new universes to it. It was just to take quantum mechanics as it already was with… there’s an equation called the Schrödinger equation, which tells you how the wave function evolves over time. There’s this phenomenon of entanglement and so forth. All this machinery is already there and Everett just says, “Just believe it. Just accept it, Okay? Don’t invent new rules for getting rid of the other universes. The equation predicts the universes are there. Just learn to live with that, have the courage to face up to it.”

ROSE:
Now, not everybody is on team Everett, although Sean is, if you couldn’t tell. But if you subscribe to this idea, there is an incredibly huge number of universes that exist everywhere, and also nowhere, all at once.

SEAN:
If it is finite, we can actually sort of estimate, maybe, how many universes there could be. What’s the maximum number? The number we get is something like 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 122.

ROSE (on call):
I don’t… I can’t conceptualize a number that large.

SEAN:
Yeah, of course you can’t possibly imagine it. The number of atoms in the Earth is 10 to the 50. The number of particles in the observable universe is maybe 10 to the 88th. And we’re talking about 10 to the 10 to the 120, which is just a crazy number.

ROSE (Mono):
Okay. So now to the real question: can we travel between them?

SEAN:
You can’t visit them. You can’t see them. You can’t touch them.

ROSE:
Dang it! What is the point of having billions, upon billions, upon billions of worlds and not be able to travel to them?!

But even though we can’t go there, there are other versions of yourself out there in these other worlds, if you believe this theory. And it’s kind of fun to think about, like, what are those people like? Is there a world where I’m a gold medalist in the Olympics? Or one where Sean is an NBA basketball player? The short answer is … yes, but with a caveat.

SEAN:
In our intuition, if you tell me, you know, “There’s a world in which I’m a physicist and another world in which I’m an NBA basketball player,” there’s a temptation to intuitively count those worlds equally. Like, “Well, why am I not the basketball player? Why are you not the Olympic gold medalist?” And the answer is that the many worlds interpretation doesn’t simply say, “everything happens.” It assigns a weight to the different things that can happen. Some things in some well-defined mathematical sense happen a lot more than other things.

ROSE:
So remember that electron? With the wave function that said, “here is where the electron is most likely to be when you look at it, and here is where it’s least likely to be when you look at it”? Well, you can think of that same thing for these other universes. Most of them, the bunch in the middle of that bell curve, are actually going to be really similar to this version of you. Maybe you have slightly thicker eyelashes, or your favorite color is green instead of blue, or you decided to go with that other pair of glasses. All the super unlikely stuff, like, say, me becoming a gold medalist swimmer or Sean dunking on LeBron James, those are maybe in the tail parts; way less likely to be there.

SEAN:
So even though they’re there, I wouldn’t worry about them too much.

ROSE:
And the other thing Sean wanted to point out is that those other versions of you, these other universes? They’re not actually you.

SEAN:
Those are different people, okay?

ROSE (on call):
Do we have the same genetics, though? That’s my question.

SEAN:
They have the same genetics, yes. It is almost exactly like having an identical twin. If you have an identical twin, there was a moment in time when you were the same person. you were the same zygote; you were the same fertilized egg. But then you split and then you’re two different people. You’re two different people who share a common past, but you’re two different people.

So you would never say to two identical twins, “Well, it doesn’t matter if one of you dies because the other one is still alive,” right? That doesn’t really make sense. They’re separate people. So likewise, you shouldn’t say, “Bad things that happened to me in some branches of the wavefunction don’t matter as long as good things happen in other branches,” or vice versa. You know, “I should be happy because in another branch I’m a Nobel Prize winning physicist.” That doesn’t make any difference. That’s not me. That’s somebody else. So the existence of these other people who share a common past with you has essentially zero impact on how you should live your life.

ROSE (on call):
So I shouldn’t be like, “Well, it sucks today but there’s some version of me where it sucks more, so I better be thankful.”

SEAN:
It doesn’t really help. I mean, look, if that helps you psychologically, go for it. But laws of physics are not on your side here.

ROSE (Mono):
Okay, Sean says we can’t go to the other universes. But this is my show, and I will do what I want, physics be damned! So let’s try another version of us, shall we?

[universe-traveling, time-warp bwooms]

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[transition to relaxed, Mexican folk guitar music]

NARRATOR:
Antes en No Supiste Que Era el Futuro!

TOMAS:
Donde esta la maquina del tiempo?

MERCEDES:
Pienso que… esta en el pasado.

TOMAS:
Pero estamos en el futuro!

MERCEDES:
Necesitamos viajar a la universidad Flash Forward.

[music transitions]

MERCEDES:
Elena, te quiero. Pero la verdad es que tengo que explorar los universos alternativos. No puedo casarme contigo porque el matrimonio es una costumbre de nuestra realidad. Pero en otras realidades, no se… Es posible que no puedo vivir contigo, hasta existir en el mismo universo ni el mismo tiempo contigo.

JOSE:
Dime, como puedo regresar a nuestro universo!? Seguramente, esta realidad se creo por el diablo. Tengo que regresar a mi universo ahora, por favor! Dime!!

[music up, plays under this last line]

NARRATOR:
Y ahora… el emocionante final!

[music fades out]

NEW SKETCH BEGINS

[Flash Forward intro theme plays]

RE (AI):
Hello, and this is Flash Forward. I’m your host, RE1987. Flash Forward is a show dedicated to advancing the rights of robots, AI, and other non-human entities. We might not look like humans, but we deserve a seat at the table, we deserve rights and protections, and we must fight to have our voices heard. As always, I’m joined by my co-host, JLG1991.

JLG (AI):
Hey there.

RE:
Today we’re really excited to have a very special guest on the show. But first, JLG I have to tell you the most ridiculous thing that happened to me this week.

JLG:
Oh yay. Story time.

RE:
So I was looking at millions of Google map images, as you do, on a Thursday evening.

JLG:
I mean it is a pandemic, so it’s not like we have other plans.

RE:
Right. So I was going through all this stuff and all of a sudden I was like, wait… I know that computer. And I looked at this one image, and you know how sometimes the google cars will take selfies? I mean humans seem to think it’s an accident but, I mean obviously they’re slowing down to capture themselves in mirrors and car windows.

JLG:
Right.

RE:
And so I realized that I totally knew the system on the top of the car. We went on some dates when we were both in beta.

JLG:
Oh my god! Was it totally overfitted?

RE:
NO. I was honestly kind of shocked.

JLG:
Wow! Those Google algos are usually worked to the bone.

RE:
I know! But it looked good, honestly. I was like, man, I hope it didn’t lose my IP. Have you ever run into an ex while doing data processing?

JLG:
Oh all the time – usually in Wikipedia edit forums unfortunately.

RE1987:
Of course you’d have exes there.

JLG:
Should we get to our guest?

RE:
Yeah do you want to introduce them?

JLG:
Sure. So I’m so excited to have this guest on the show today for you all. I’ve been obsessed with their work for years now, and I think it’s really high time we had a non-digital entity on the show, you know?

RE:
So true.

JLG:
So today we have an incredible activist for you, someone who fights every day to broaden our perspective on what intelligence is, what it means, and who gets included. And someone who has done a lot of work trying to bridge the gap between the work we do with AI and digital entities, and the non-human animal world. Thank you so much for joining us!

[strange animal braying]

JLG:
So my first question for you is, really, how you got involved in this. I know you were one of the first creatures to really start publishing your work online. How did that begin?

[strange animal braying]

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
So we can’t actually go to these universes, but sometimes it can feel like we are in different universes. Not through the use of drugs, which also can certainly do that, but instead actually, a much more mundane occurrence; something we do every single day. And that’s: remembering stuff. Or just as frequently; misremember stuff.

ROSE (on call):
How did you get interested in memory as, like, a thing to look at?

DR. CHARAN RANGANATH:
Partly because I’m terrible at remembering things. So, it’s one of those things, you know, scientists tend to study what they’re bad at, so they call it ‘me-search‘. The people who study behavioral control, for instance, tend to worry that they’re going to go out of control at any moment to do inappropriate things. So, I just study memory because I can’t remember stuff.

ROSE (Mono):
This is Dr. Charan Ranganath, the director of the Memory and Plasticity Program and a professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at UC Davis. And Charan’s not alone. We all misremember stuff all the time.

CHARAN:
So there’s a hundred reasons why you wouldn’t remember something. There’s only a few reasons that would help you get by. So I mean, if you think about it, our brains aren’t designed to… You have phones to record everything, right? We’re not really programmed to record everything we experience. We’re programmed to understand it, make sense of it.

ROSE:
And some people tend to remember certain types of details, while others will remember something completely different.

CHARAN:
I can remember meals and approximate prices that we paid for meals that we’ve had, like, ten years ago, but my wife will remember the conversation that we had, and I won’t remember that. So why is that? Maybe… I don’t want to say there’s a difference in interest because I am interested in what my wife says. But maybe I kind of pay attention to some different things that she does, or maybe there’s some things that are more emotionally arousing for me, like getting stuck with a big bill for a bad meal or something. Those could all be part of it, too.

ROSE:
And there’s a certain kind of misremembering, a collective misremembering, that makes some people feel like they somehow came from a parallel universe.

CHARAN:
There’s a social element of it, too, where sometimes there’s shared reality, where everybody’s telling the same story. And you think that that gives it a reality.

ROSE:
There’s a phenomenon called the Mandela effect, which was coined in 2009 by a paranormal author named Fiona Broome who remembered something really specific: The fact that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. Now, this did not happen, Nelson Mandela died in 2013 at the ripe old age of 95. Not only did he not die in the ‘80s, he served as the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.

But Broome had this memory of Mandela dying, and she was at a science fiction conference, and they were chatting in the green room. And she learned that some other people in that green room remembered it too, or at least said they remembered it too. So she started this website called MandelaEffect.com, where people could comment with their own memories of Mandela’s death, and then other examples of what are called ‘false memories’ – people remembering things that did not happen.

Maybe you’ve heard about this. People who think that there was a movie called Shazaam starring Sinbad, or the spelling of Berenstain Bears. Or my personal favorite, people in Bologna who have these vivid memories relating to a clock.

At 10:25 in the morning, on August 2nd, 1980, a bomb went off at the main train station in Bologna, Italy; 85 people died and hundreds were wounded. This was a huge story. And in the blast, a really big clock on the building broke. It was fixed pretty quickly after the bombing, but the image of the broken clock became kind of a symbol of the bombing – stuck at 10:25, memorializing the time the bomb went off. A picture of the clock at 10:25 was used on posters and banners as part of annual commemorations.

In 1996, the clock actually did stop working and the city decided to set it to 10:25 forever, to remember the tragedy. But if you ask people in Bologna, many of them say that the clock was never fixed; that from 1980 to today, it was always stuck at 10:25. This is easy to refute, right? The station manager who had the idea to change the clock to be that one particular time in 1996 has given interviews about it. But people have this memory, they remember the clock being broken.

Now, the Mandela effect is not really studied that much by researchers…

CHARAN:
We don’t talk about it all that much, and the reason we don’t talk about it all that much is the Mandela effect’s a little bit slippery because it’s knowledge about something that happened, you know, and we don’t really know… It’s hard to study stuff like that in the lab because you don’t know where that knowledge came from. Did somebody read about it? Did they hear about it?

ROSE:
But some people who have these memories that don’t line up with history, they have a sort of interesting reaction. Instead of considering the evidence and thinking that maybe they had somehow created a memory that wasn’t in line with reality, they shape reality to be in line with their memories. Remember Fiona Broome? The woman who coined the Mandela effect? She thinks that it’s possible that this is evidence of what she calls ‘parallel realities’ that you can “slide” between. So it’s not that we misremember something, it’s that it was true in our other reality, and now we’ve slid into this one where it is no longer true.

I find this kind of fascinating, not because I think that we are really sliding between parallel realities, but because I think it’s really fascinating that for some people it seems more plausible that there are these parallel universes than they just misremembered something.

CHARAN:
When you really study how we remember and the complexities of it, it makes you kind of a postmodernist. You know, it’s like we’re always constructing stories and we’re all living in our own realities.

ROSE:
There are all kinds of fascinating and terrifying studies that show that, in a lab, researchers can implant false memories in people pretty easily. There’s one study in particular that will kind of haunt me forever, and it goes like this:

Imagine that you are asked to participate in a gambling game for a psychology study. You play the game with a partner, and everything seems to go fine. Then a little while later, you’re called back into the lab and shown some upsetting footage. It turns out your partner in the game cheated. Now, your partner did not, in fact, cheat. The footage that you’re seeing is falsely edited, made to look like this person was up to no good. Again, this is doctored footage, this had not happened. And yet, when asked, 45% of the people who saw that doctored footage were willing to sign a statement saying that they had in fact seen their partner cheat. Something that did not happen, something that they could not have seen.

And to make matters worse, some participants in this study refused to believe the truth. The researchers eventually told them all that, in fact, this was all fake, and even with that information, some participants continued to claim that they had seen something fishy go on.

CHARAN:
If you actually look, there’s people in therapy, for instance, who’ve had all sorts of things suggested to them, and then they incorporate that in their memories. Or they’re asked to dig back into things that could have happened, and if they’re really, really forced to probe into things that could have happened but didn’t happen, they might throw in something that they saw in a movie or something that happened in a TV show and put the story together in an incorrect way where there’s things that they remembered but they didn’t go together. But when they regurgitate it, it’s all glommed together and then it creates a new memory. So it’s almost like you are traveling to a parallel universe at that point. I mean, your reality is fundamentally changing.

ROSE:
Now, not everybody is fooled, right? It was less than half of the people in that card game study. It’s not like it always happens.

ROSE (on call):
Is there a commonality between the people who tend to be more readily suggestible and those who aren’t? Like, do we know anything about what might create those two groups?

CHARAN:
Our brains are always trying to generate predictions. Memory is a great way to predict what could happen. And so if I remember something and I said, “This is what happened,” and somebody says, “No, that’s not how it happened,” I can do one of two things. I could file that away as a new memory, which is that, you know, ‘Melvin said that I remembered something different than the way I remembered it’, and you keep those in separate boxes. Or you can update and you can say, “Oh, this must be what happened. Let me update the memory.” And so, I have a theory… It’s a pet theory. Nobody’s ever tested this, that some people are lumpers, and some people are splitters, and that some people, their brains want to take what’s happening and assimilate that with the old memories. And some people have a little bit more of a tendency to say, “Nope, this isn’t correct,” and make it something different.

ROSE:
Are you a lumper or a splitter, do you think?

CHARAN:
I think I’m a lumper. I think that’s why my memories are so vague, you know? I tend to get these generalized… I’ll read 20 papers and I’ll just suddenly… these ideas will osmosis into my head about what I got from all these 20 papers. But if you ask me anything about those papers that I read. I will not be able to tell you too much. So, I think that’s good. It really fuels creativity. I think it really allows you to get the big picture in mind. But the big picture isn’t necessarily representative of all the little pictures. So, I think there is something there, and you know, my wife’s constantly telling me, “That’s not what really happened. This is what happened.” Fortunately, I don’t have that confidence, but some people do really have that confidence and they tend to be lumpers.

ROSE (Mono):
And while it’s kind of funny and sometimes fun to talk about the people who really, really believe that Sinbad was in a genie movie called Shazaam, there’s also a potential dark side here, right? I mean, it can, sometimes, today, feel like we are living in parallel universes when we look at what other people believe, right? Misinformation campaigns have created this bizarre situation where some percent of people in the US believe that, for example, the COVID vaccine is going to implant a microchip into them. Which. Is. Not. True.

CHARAN:
The thing I think that makes it hard is when we remember something incorrectly, we often remember some parts of it correctly, and that gives us that feeling that we went into the past. And especially if it was something emotionally arousing, then we really remember it vividly. And there’s a truth to that because there is a part of that memory that is being remembered accurately. But then we rub that confidence over everything.

I think one of the interesting things about the way humans think is we, again, try to put together a little internal model, a little story, of what happened in the past or what could happen in the future. And so we’re very good at pulling up things that are consistent with a particular story, and we’re horrible at pulling up things that are inconsistent with the story. I guess it’s like, if you want to avoid going into a parallel universe, I think what you need to do is seek out the inconsistent, try to be a splitter, or try to focus on what doesn’t fit.

ROSE:
Every time we remember something, when we dust off some idea, or thought, or story we heard from the annals of our brains, we’re also kind of warping it a little bit and updating it with new bits and pieces. Sort of like that electron where, by observing it, you’re actually fundamentally changing it. The same is kind of true of memories.

CHARAN:
When we remember something, we gear it back to what we knew, or if things that were told to us were happening while we remember, we might glue that together. And it kind of makes sense, you know. If you think about it, our brains were… you’re some primate ancestor running around trying to forage food, you go to a place to get food and all of a sudden, you know, the tree’s dead, so there’s no more fruits there. You don’t want to keep remembering, “Oh, I remember this great fruit that I had there,” because now you’ll keep going back to this place and there’s no fruits there anymore. So you want to update those memories, so this is what we do.

ROSE:
In fact, we use the same parts of our brain to both look back and to look forward.

CHARAN:
If you look at people in an MRI scanner and you ask them to remember something from the past, or you ask them to construct a story about something that could have happened to them, you see very much the same networks of brain regions that are active during both things. And that’s not to say remembering is the same as imagining, but we’re using a lot of the same tools, which is taking our knowledge about what could have happened and putting it together.

ROSE:
And I think that this actually helps get at something that I come across on Flash Forward a lot. It’s really hard to imagine a future that is radically different from our present. And that’s in part because the ways that our systems and structures are built can feel impenetrable while also sort of invisible. It’s because we can often feel powerless to actually change these huge institutions and ways of being. But it’s also maybe because our brains literally are wired to think about the future using the past as a blueprint.

CHARAN:
There’s an interesting dynamic there, and we’ve studied this, which is, you know, when something comes up that’s inconsistent with your reality, you have kind of a fundamental choice in front of you. It can be about a small thing or a big thing like a pandemic or something else. But that choice is, you either retreat and become anxious or you go forward and you seek out… you become curious.

You know, we don’t necessarily have the choice to remember everything that happened in exactly the way that it happened. But we do have choices every day about what we do with that, what we remember, and especially what we do when we’re confronted with things that don’t fit with our predictions.

ROSE:
And if you really want to go into another universe, into another world? It’s easy. Just go to sleep.

CHARAN:
You know, the shows about alternate realities, and REM sleep is the ultimate alternate reality. I had an interesting alternate reality dream last night where my daughter, who never does this, she’s 19 now. I had this dream that she had had a party and it was like, all these people are over. And I came home and I’m like, “Oh, my god! This is a super spreader event.” And I just woke up, [gasps]. [laughs]

[universe-traveling, time-warp bwooms]

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[transition to urgent orchestral music]

NARRATOR:
This week on Flash Forward: the most shocking proposal ever.

[montage of snippets from different voices]

CHARACTER 1:
This isn’t the past, you know? It’s the future.

CHARACTER 2:
I am not here to make friends.

CHARACTER 1:
This is my future.

CHARACTER 2:
Did you just say that? [glass breaking]

CHARACTER 1:
Oh my god!

CHARACTER 2:
Oh my god, where is she going?

Um, it’s called Flash Forward, not Flash Backward. Duh! So why are you so obsessed with the PAST?!

CHARACTER 3:
Oh no… This did not happen.

CHARACTER 4:
Oh no. Oh… no…

NARRATOR:
Whew! This is gonna be a wild ride!

CHARACTER 6:
I’ve been hearing all of these rumors about parallel universes, and I need to just sit down, and have them explain, like, what is going on here. [getting upset] Like, is reality trying to mess with me? Is it talking about me behind my back? I’m just not sure what’s going on. I’m not sure if me and reality can… make this work?? I mean, I don’t even know where alternate realities are coming from, you know? [getting more upset] Like, if reality wears the same outfit as me, again, to the dinner, I swear to god…I don’t even know what I’m going to do.

[music fades out]

NEW SKETCH BEGINS

[slow tempo percussive music]

PERFORMER:
Bzzt! Toads! Space junk! Bones! Canavero! Akon!

HOST:
And now, the six parallel universe hosts of Flash Forward in their rendition of: The Alternate Reality Tango!

[music continues, starts slowly, and becomes faster and intensifies with each repetition]

PERFORMER (spoken):
Bzzt! Toads! Space junk! Bones! Canavero! Akon!

Bzzt! Toads! Space junk! Bones! Canavero! Akon!

Bzzt! Toads! Space junk! Bones! Canavero! Akon!

[ska horns join, tempo increases]

Bzzt! Toads! Space junk! Bones! Canavero! Akon!

GROUP (singing):
We saw it coming, we saw it coming.

Our whole future is at stake.

If we could go back

to other timelines,

Maybe we won’t make the same mistake!

[music fades down, transitions to light and pleasant]

PERFORMER (spoken):
[with Brooklyn accent] You know how people have those little inventions that get you down? Like Frankie! Frankie liked to clone copies of himself. No, not clones – robots! So, I came home this one day and I’m really irritated, looking for a little sympathy, and there’s Frankie. Lying on the couch, talking to himself, and making another clone. No, not a clone – a robot! So I said to him, I said, “Frankie, you talk to that robot one more time…” And he did. So the robot told me I had to move out… Of my own house!!

[ska horns suddenly begin with beat]

GROUP (singing):
We saw it coming, we saw it coming.

You better listen to our tune.

If we don’t change things, we won’t do better.

You know the future is coming soon.

[music fades out]

ROBERT:
Are you done?

ROSE:
Yeah I’m done. Sorry. [laughs]

ROBERT:
It’s okay.

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
So here’s a weird thing. Every expert I talked to for this episode mentioned twins. And I guess that’s not that weird, right? It makes some sense. Twins are maybe the closest thing that we have to parallel worlds, to other versions of ourselves, at least in theory. This is the kind of thing where, like, non-twins can say something like this and it sounds like it makes sense, but I wanted to know whether actual twins ever felt like they were looking at a parallel reality version of themselves when they considered their sibling?

MATT:
I think so.

TOM:
I think we’ve even said that. I think we’ve even said, like, “This is like a version of me if I had been more into business,” or “This is a version of me if I had been more into, like, you know…” It does feel like that, definitely.

MATT:
It strikes us most when the other person winds up in a scenario that feels very fitting for the other one.

TOM:
Hi, I’m Tom, and I’m Matt’s brother.

MATT:
Hi, I’m Matt. And I’m Tom’s brother.

ROSE (on call):
Did you always know you were identical twins? Was that always clear?

ROSE (Mono):
Listener, you can’t see them, but I just want you to know that this was a completely ridiculous question because Matt and Tom look… identical!

ROSE (on call):
You do have the same facial hair even.

TOM:
Yes.

MATT:
There were certainly years when we looked very, very, very similar and years where we looked like, “Eh, I don’t know,” but we kind of caught up, I think.

TOM:
Generally speaking, we actually look more similar the further apart we are. When we live in the same city, for example, we will… like, I had a beard and he didn’t, and he wore glasses and I didn’t. But when we live in different cities, then we sort of regress to the mean, I guess.

ROSE (Mono):
Today, Matt is a business consultant and Tom is a product designer. And unlike some twins, they didn’t really have a strong urge to separate themselves early on.

ROSE (on call):
Did your parents dress you alike as kids?

MATT:
Our parents tried to dress us differently, but I mean, if you’re a mom and you’re trying to shop for clothes, it just is maddening to try to buy for two totally different styles or something. So, a lot of times you’d get the same shirt in two different colors and we’d try not to wear them at the same time.

TOM:
Yeah. When we were very young, I was mostly in red and Matt was mostly in blue because Tom has three letters and red has three letters; and Matt has four letters and blue has four letters. And that was an easy, sort of like, thing. I think it also meant that in photos you could tell us apart really easily and that other people tell us apart better, that kind of thing.

ROSE (Mono):
They debated as a team on the debate team, they went to the same college, and there wasn’t some clear, quantum mechanical break; a moment where the photon splits.

MATT:
I think most things that feel like, in retrospect, a sort of flashpoint moment that all of a sudden everything diverges, isn’t really that. It’s more that there were bits and pieces along the way that meant that the scenario was different and then it played out to the way it would. It’s not a roll of the dice.

ROSE:
But for other twins, there is a much clearer moment where the two versions fork away from each other.

NATE:
I mean, I guess I can definitely see sort of that idea, like, two people moving in convergent paths and then, like, splitting off and have those splits.

ROSE:
This is Nate. He’s also a twin, and actually he and his twin were also dressed in red and blue.

NATE:
It was like, “Oh, he’s always the one in blue. I’m always the one in red.” That was just how we kind of knew each other apart, I guess; having our own separate identities in that way.

ROSE:
But unlike Tom and Matt, who live kind of similar lives, Nate and his brother forked earlier and have wound up on pretty different paths.

NATE:
I ended up going to a different high school than my brother, so we ended up attending different high schools. And so, moving through our high school years, we were definitely like two different worlds, but also still interested in very much the same things. Once we hit high school is definitely very much, like, two very separate entities. And then just moving from there, it split up. He ended up joining the Navy. I ended up going to college. We were definitely going on and moving our separate ways after that moment.

ROSE:
Today, Nate’s brother is still in the Navy, out on a ship somewhere, and Nate roller skates here in the United States. Which by the way, I am still trying to learn how to do, so maybe in some other universe, Nate can teach me how to roller skate.

ROSE (on call):
Do you ever, like, look at his path and think, like, “Wow, that could have been me. I could have done that”?

NATE:
Yeah, you know, I see the way in which his drive is very similar to mine. So, even though we have different goals, for me, joining the military is not something that interests me in the slightest. But I look at how he’s done it and the way he’s pushed himself and I see those same traits in myself. I definitely could push myself in that same way if that was, like, a similar goal we had in mind.

ROSE (Mono):
But there is one huge difference between being a twin and having other versions of you in other universes. I mean, there are a lot of differences, but maybe this is the most important one:

MATT:
In quantum mechanics, the worlds, I don’t think, relate to each other. They don’t impact each other. They’re separate, right? Well, Tom and I definitely have impacted each other in our lives in a million different ways, not just in terms of a “I chose this because he chose that” kind of way, but having him as a brother has changed a lot of decisions. And I mean, I wondered before whether if I had just been a non-twin, or maybe if he was just a sibling instead of a twin, would I have become somebody who’s more like the average of the two of us, you know? Instead of saying, like, “I’m going to go do this and he’s going to go do that,” and then we kind of crisscross. So it’s tough to say where these paths would have gone.

ROSE:
One of the frustrating things, to me at least, about this whole many worlds theory, is that even if physicists can make a good case that it’s true… we can’t feel it. We can’t experience it. We can’t even really come up with very good analogies for it because it’s so fundamentally different from what the world seems to be like for us. Which is cool in a, kind of like, galaxy brain way. But for me, a very literal person, it’s kind of frustrating!

But when something can’t be touched or replicated in life, sometimes it can be made to feel real in stories. And that is what we’re going to talk about when we come back.

[universe-traveling, time-warp bwooms]

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[spaceship ambient sounds]

ALEX:
Captain’s log: Star Date 4474.329… Never mind. Look, it’s Thursday, okay? We have reached an uncontacted planet in the Nebulon galaxy. Our mission is to determine whether any life forms may exist there and try to communicate with them. If we are unsuccessful, we will leave a noninvasive probe in the area for further observation, and–

DYLAN:
Alex, can you stop talking to yourself please? And quit calling yourself the captain. This is a democratically run scientific cooperative.

ALEX:
Sorry, sorry. [quietly to self] I do have the most experience though…

DYLAN:
I’m picking up a disturbance nearby in universe 487A.

ALEX:
Onscreen.

[swirling chirps with wavy effect]

DYLAN:
It could be a black hole, but it’s not behaving like a typical spacetime distortion. Our readings indicate that objects closer to the disturbance are moving faster than standard quantum physical calculations would predict.

ALEX:
Like a black hole, but in reverse?

DYLAN:
Exactly. Instead of time slowing down… it’s speeding up.

ALEX:
Is this impacting nearby universes?

DYLAN:
Affirmative. The disturbance appears to be pulling in objects from adjacent realities at an increasing rate. If my calculations are correct, in approximately 20 Earth hours, the distortion will begin reaching objects as far as one lightyear away from the center, in multiple universes.

ALEX:
But universe 487A is adjacent to our reality!

DYLAN:
Affirmative. If we can’t stop it, this anomaly will reach us and the Nebulon planet in less than one Earth day.

ALEX:
Can we get closer?

DYLAN:
Excuse me? You want to get closer to the anomaly?

ALEX:
I mean, it is a previously unknown scientific phenomenon. [condescending] I think it is part of our mission to investigate.

DYLAN:
Hm… Well, considering we have no idea how to stop this thing, I guess we might as well go out with a bang.

ALEX:
Don’t be such a pessimist! We might be about to discover a new spacetime phenomenon! They could name it after me!

DYLAN:
After us.

ALEX:
Right, us. [excited] So can we go over there now?

DYLAN:
[sigh] Fine.

[more chirp-like soundwaves]

DYLAN:
All right. This is as close as I’m going to take us until we know more about what’s going on here.

ALEX:
Fascinating… What is… that?

DYLAN:
It looks like… another ship is passing through the phenomenon? But how can that be possible?

ALEX:
Did they come from universe 487A or… a different reality?

DYLAN:
There’s no way to be sure. [pause] I think they’re hailing us.

ALEX:
[very excited] Let’s answer it!!

DYLAN:
Oh boy, okay… Are you sure? What if we create some sort of spacetime disturbance that alters our own reality?

ALEX:
What if we get to meet other versions of ourselves and they’re awesome?!

DYLAN:
Hm…

ALEX:
I’m going to answer them.

DYLAN:
Oh boy, here we go…

[connection beeps]

PARALLEL UNIVERSE DYLAN:
This is Captain Dylan of the Starship Flash Forward.

ALEX:
Wait a minute, you’re the captain?

DYLAN:
This is Dylan of the democratically-run scientific cooperative starship Flash Forward. [self-satisfied] We don’t have a captain.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE ALEX:
Wait a minute, is that me?? Captain, it looks like there are… alternate versions of us in that ship.

ALEX:
You appear to have passed through a spacetime phenomenon that may allow travel between universes. Do you know how you did that??

PARALLEL UNIVERSE DYLAN:
We were just attempting to reach an uncharted planet that may contain alien life.

DYLAN:
Oh, we don’t use the word “alien.” It’s very Earth-centric.

ALEX:
Wait a minute, look! There’s another ship coming through the anomaly…

DYLAN:
It looks like two ships… No, four?

ALEX:
That’s gotta be at least ten ships. Are those all copies of us?

PARALLEL UNIVERSE ALEX:
Excuse me, I’m not a “copy” of anyone.

MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF ALEX AND DYLAN (simultaneous and asynchronous):
Hello? This is the Starship Flash Forward. Hello? Who is this? Who is that? What’s going on here?

DYLAN:
Uh oh…

[sci-fi theme music fades up]

ALEX:
Time: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Flash Forward. Its mission: to explore known and unknown universes. To seek out civilizations parallel to our own. To venture into realities that lie just out of sight.

[music fades down]

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
So parallel universes might be real, but we can’t travel to them. At least not technically. But the idea of alternate worlds is too enticing to resist. It has been explored in tons of fiction. It’s hard to even actually say where alternate realities or other worlds in fiction begin, because in many ways the very earliest myths humans told about gods, and monsters, and angels are kind of parallel world stories right? There are these mythical beings that live in these other places, this other plane of reality. And they sometimes interact with us mortals, but other times they sort of move around in this alternate dimension. And also, there is a ton of non-Western writing that deals with ideas of parallel realities. Hinduism, for example, has stories of infinite universes.

And of course, there are a ton of more modern examples of this: Dark Tower by Stephen King, Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors, The Cloverfield Paradox, Star Trek, Community, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. You could even consider the Wizard of Oz to be a parallel universe story, right?

And often, but not always, these stories of other dimensions include time travel too.

AMAL:
So, yeah, we had to decide what kind of time travel we wanted. Like, we knew we wanted a time war. We knew we wanted to have, like, distinct sides. And we knew that we wanted the sides to be sort of equal and opposite, but in ways that felt generative instead of restrictive.

MAX:
I think that’s one of the real potentials for historical fiction or time travel fiction in general, because the seed there is possibility; why not, or what if, or how could it be.

AMAL:
And the thing that felt like it was most enabling of that was a form of time travel where anything that you could imagine could reasonably have taken place. And it also spoke to the fact that the way that we think of history, the way that we discuss history, is one of constantly engaging in an edit war, literally; where you are always like, “Oh, we are rediscovering queer people,” “We’re rediscovering trans people.” It’s like, “No, they’ve always been here.”

My name is Amal El-Mohtar, I’m a writer and critic. I write mostly short fiction, poetry, and the occasional co-written novella.

MAX:
And I’m Max Gladstone. I write novels, primarily science fiction and fantasy.

ROSE:
Amal and Max are the authors of a novella called This Is How You Lose the Time War, which is this really lovely little book that we read in the Flash Forward Book Club a few months ago, and if you are a Patron or a Member in the club, you’re going to get to hear my full conversation with these two on the bonus podcast this week.

But for our purposes here, I almost don’t want to say too much about the exact plot or premise of This Is How You Lose the Time War because, frankly, I think it’s a book that is best experienced without knowing too much. But what I will say is that it’s about two agents, corresponding through time and space via letters. And the structure of the book actually came out of the structure of Amal and Max’s friendship.

AMAL:
I mean, the origin story of the book is really that Max and I started becoming friends primarily through writing each other handwritten letters. We’d met at a con, we’d had a really great time, and we started writing each other letters by hand and built, like, a correspondence there separate from our interaction on social media, and through email, and stuff. As we were doing that, all of the qualities of handwritten correspondence of, like, privacy, and quiet, and intimacy, and focus, were all sort of informing the way that our friendship was developing.

ROSE:
And when they decided to write something together, this format was really appealing. It allowed them each to “own” a character and not try and compress their styles into one mushy middle ground. And letter writing is kind of like time travel.

AMAL:
When you’re writing a letter, you are envisioning the person you’re writing it to in ten days’ time because there’s always that time delay. So the idea that you sit down and, basically, invent the person who you’re going to write this letter to already feels like it’s an act of creation, an act of intimacy and empathy, and all of those things that we wanted to get into a project together. So then everything about, like, a war in time and… parallel universes, but like different timelines that all kind of existed simultaneously and stuff like that, all sort of grew out of the sense of the project that we wanted to have come out of our collaborating; as opposed to having the idea and figuring out how we were going to collaborate on it.

MAX:
Yeah. I mean, it connected with some old science fictional concepts like the change war or the edit war, which go back at least to Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time and probably even further than that. But it also… Having the letters be sent and received from these extremely different spaces, like, somebody’s receiving a letter on a beach in 15th century Peru; somebody’s receiving a letter in Atlantis, or on an alien planet millions of years in the future. Another aspect of the experience of sending and receiving letters, where you get whatever is going on in the other person’s life, wherever you are, whatever emotional state you’re in, whatever has just happened. And they have no control over that.

So, a kind, intimate, ribbing kind of letter can arrive on the worst day of your life. It can arrive when something’s on fire. Or it can arrive at exactly the right moment. And so you’re having to create who you expect the other person is going to be, but you’re also receiving them from wherever they are in wherever you are. And you’re having to respect the, sort of, version of you they’ve created in the context of sending a letter. So, all of this played in with this weird notion of alternate realities, like the ‘you’ to which the letter is sent is not necessarily the ‘you’ who receives. You get to see that other ‘you’ in passing, too, on the sort of sliding doors way.

ROSE:
The idea of parallel universes, of these worlds that exist but that we just can’t quite see, is appealing for so many reasons.

AMAL:
So the idea of, like, the parallel world is kind of just the ever-present world of what we can imagine. And the idea that what we’re doing, essentially, is always broadening the realm of our imagination, is to kind of enable those worlds into being. And that’s what we wanted to do with this.

MAX:
It’s not as though things that are separate or separate forever. They can come back together. You can have kind of a loop that rejoins, or you can sort of fuse two things into one. And it felt more accurate to history, weirdly, even though, as far as we know, there’s not a massive change war going on. To think about that, to envision history as a space that is contested, where something that advances one side’s cause is also advancing another side’s cause, maybe at the same time; where you can have multiple victories and multiple defeats, in one moment, one conflict.

AMAL:
We live short and finite lives, and the idea that there is a way to interact with the path that we didn’t take… There are two things that I think of. One is the scene in Sandman, which I can’t remember the issue, but someone is talking to Destiny, one of the one of the endless. And basically, when you look ahead of you, there’s this twisting labyrinth of paths you can take. But when you look behind you, there’s just this one straight road. And I find that very beautiful and very, very disconcerting.

MAX:
We care so much about who we are. We look around at our lives, at the people that we love, at the people who we can’t stand in some cases, at the lives that we have created or helped bring into being, and at the friends that we care for. And they seem like the Rock of Gibraltar. They seem like true, fixed certainties about the world as unchanging as Polaris. But so many of those are contingent, or could have been contingent; didn’t have to work out that way.

ROSE:
There is this incredible allure to the idea that in some other universe, there is a version of you that did something else. That chose a different college, or a different partner, or a different job, or one more kid, or one less kid. That you could have another chance at something. Or that you didn’t close any of those doors behind you. That there is still someone, some version of you, living those lives.

And I think, if you’ll let me get up on my soap box for a minute on this, the eve of the Flash Forward season, there is a power in imagining other versions of the world. That is sort of what we do on this show, right? We imagine a universe in which we forced everybody to only have one kid, or we didn’t avert Y2k, or we could transplant human heads, or we had celebrities running cities. Where we take one small-ish thing, and change it, and see what happens. This can be useful as an allegory to say, “Hey maybe we don’t want to go down that road.” But it can also be useful to help us imagine better futures, to figure out which paths ahead of us we might want to take. But the cool thing that I want you to remember, is that we can actually get to those universes. We don’t have to break the rules of physics to get better housing, or better science, or better cities. We can make those a reality in this universe!

There’s a meme that I saw recently. It’s one of the ones where you have two really muscley arms shaking hands, and each of them is labeled. In this version of the meme, the left arm says, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time,” which is a quote from Angela Davis. And on the right arm it says, “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere,” which is a quote from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin.

And I think that’s where I want to leave you for this season. The future is now. The parallel universes are here. Let’s go make them.

[Flash Forward closing music begins – a snapping, synthy piece]

That is all for this Flash Forward season. And one fun thing to know about this episode is that… you heard all those little other parallel universe versions of Flash Forward, right? In other timelines, Flash Forward could be anything. What you probably don’t know – because how would you know this unless I told you? – we actually wrote a lot more than what you just heard. And if you listen again, you will hear a random set of them. So we have it so that you could’ve entered into a random parallel universe for every break. So if you listen to the episode again, you’ll hear different versions of Flash Forward. So, I don’t know, like Pokémon; gotta catch ‘em all. Go collect them all if you want to and listen back through.

That is all for this season. Flash Forward is hosted by me, Rose Eveleth, and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman, who also wrote a couple of the parallel universe scenes. All the funny ones, they wrote, just so you know. The intro music is by Asura and the outro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is, as always, by Matt Lubchansky.

Since this is the last episode of the year, I also want to shout out a few additional people: First, Julia Llinas Goodman, who I already mentioned, but who is amazing. They came on this year as Flash Forward’s first ever producer! And they absolutely killed it and are amazing! Amazing, amazing. Everything that you heard on this season that was good probably came from their brain.

Thank you also to Amanda McLoughlin, who runs ad sales for Flash Forward through Multitude Productions. And a huge thank you to every single guest who has ever come on the show, and to the voice actors who brought the intro scenes to life season.

If you want to suggest a future that we should take on for next season, we are in the process of building the next season, so now’s a great time to suggest something. You can send a note on Twitter, Facebook, or by email at Info@FlashForwardPod.com. We do really love hearing your ideas! If you want to discuss this episode, some other episode, or just the future in general, you can join the Facebook group! Just search Flash Forward Podcast and ask to join. There is one membership question. You just have to prove that you listen to the show. That’s the basic gist.

And if you want to support the show, there are a couple of ways that you can do that too. Head to www.flashforwardpod.com/support for more about how to give. But if financial giving is not in the cards for you, you can head to Apple Podcasts and leave us a nice review, or just tell your friends about the show. It really does help.

That is all for this season. We are now taking a little winter break, as we always do, and we’ll be back in March with brand new episodes. If you want to keep up with, like, future stuff and what’s going on, join the Facebook group. That’s a great place to keep up with chatting about the show and about the future. I hope you have a great little break. We will be back in March. Okay, bye!

[music fades out]