Why do dopplegangers keep being born centuries after a divergence?

[Tom Mazanec]

To be conceived, your parents have to copulate perfectly to the picosecond and Angstrom. And for them to exist, their parents have to do so as well. And so on.
Now the mathematics of weather gives rise to the butterfly effect...a butterfly flapping its wings changes the weather after a time from what it would have been.
So why do we get things like worlds where Alexander the Great's Empire still stands and Jesus of Nazareth was never born, but Adolf Schicklgruber is a famous artist and convert to Judaism?

[Kelly Pedersen]

I'm assuming you're talking about the Infinite Worlds setting? If that's the case, then I think the answer is, depending on whether you're talking about out-of-character or in-character explanations, either "because it's cooler to have historical figures wandering around for PCs to interact with", or because "Historical Inertia". The latter is the technobabble that the setting invokes, basically saying that even after the point of divergence, most timelines aren't completely random compared to others - there literally is some kind of force that tends to cause supposedly "random" events to happen the same way across at least some timelines.

We know that some timelines have more or less of this force. Britannica-6, for example, is noted to have unusually low historical inertia, meaning that almost no one born since the point of divergence is the same as their Homeline counterparts (and, usually, no exact counterpart exists - even someone named the same could very well have significantly different genetics).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

I. Britannica-6, for example, is noted to have unusually low historical inertia, meaning that almost no one born since the point of divergence is the same as their Homeline counterparts (and, usually, no exact counterpart exists - even someone named the same could very well have significantly different genetics).

Britannica-6 is a little odder even than that. It was a one-for-one parallel until its' point of divergence but after that it has zero overlap with Homeline. An unusual change in the Historical inertia co-efficient of the Tau-Gamma force equation.

Even with divergence very high levels of Historical Inertia are known. The poster child is The United States of Lizardia where even 65 million years after divergence a different species speaks the same languages and lives in the same political units.

It's no wonder infinity researcher believe in psi.

[Flyndaran]

Realistically, virtually no parallels would even have Earths let alone life, let alone vertebrates etc.
The only real answer to these types of questions is, "because it's cool."

But one could handwave the answer that it's because realities with similarities are easier to find and visit. Those with fundamental differences must also have strange similarities to compensate allowing discovery to begin with.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Realistically, virtually no parallels would even have Earths let alone life, let alone vertebrates etc.
The only real answer to these types of questions is, "because it's cool."

Actually when you have an infinity of parallels the odds are there are many parallels that will have an Earth that also has life.

That said without some "attracting factor" the odds are pathetic with regards to a reality remotely recognizable to our own. In fact, this "attracting factor" is one of the theories the Centrum is working with as why there are so many echoes of Homeline in Q6

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by maximara

Actually when you have an infinity of parallels the odds are there are many parallels that will have an Earth that also has life.

Infinite doesn't work with math quite the way it seems like it should. With infinite worlds, it should be easy to find a world with life because there are so many. It should also be impossible to find a world with life because there are so many that don't.

If, on the other hand, there is some structure putting like worlds "near" one another, the similar worlds (whether due to there being few differences or many bizarre coincidence) would be the ones they know about. Though that also leaves you wondering why their aren't a gazillion Homeline duplicates with one undiscovered pulsar having a slightly different frequency.

[PTTG]

I thought that it was pretty clear -- the Q-system assorts worlds based on qualities that are surprisingly abstract and elaborate. There actually are an infinite number of worlds and they are infinitely distinct, but the quantum layers are much smaller infinities that look at a bundle of potentialities. Homeline's immediate neighbors tend to be those that have individualist philosophies, western influences, and human beings (or at least human-like personalities).

Nearly none of the worldlines immediately adjacent to Homeline have passed through the 1940s without having a major global war. Even many worldlines with mana have had or could plausibly have a world war.

This isn't good enough to be predictive, but that's because Homeline doesn't understand the cliodyamics needed.

Since magic seems to be a part of this universe, and magic tends to have some ability to understand abstract concepts, it's not suprising that homeline's mundane scientists can't really suss the structure of the cosmos, but there's nonetheless an apparent order to the universe.

One question that remains is, if worldlines that are similar are close, what about all the ones that are functionally identical? The uncountable number of universes where a specific electron in the upper atmosphere of Procyon bounces around slightly differently?

Well, those worldlines are so close to each other that they are in the same "spot", cosmically. Maybe they're so close that a conveyor can't distinguish between them -- but it's ok, people can't tell the difference either.

This means that there's actually a practically infinite number of Homelines, but since there's also a practically infinite number of destinations for each shipment, it actually works out fine. Nearly every time, anyway.

[malloyd]

It's a genre convention. You might as easily ask why travelers arrive on Earth - which is hard enough to explain when all realities are the same absolute time (even if you are willing to go with divergence points to allow planets to form in the same place, there's still a lot of chaos to planetary orbits, and you need them to match up very precisely if you don't want your conveyers to pop out into vacuum or solid rock), never mind in a setting where they're at different points in history when the mapping function is up against universes that aren't even the same size.

[Randyman]

Rule of Cool.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

To be conceived, your parents have to copulate perfectly to the picosecond and Angstrom. And for them to exist, their parents have to do so as well. And so on.
Now the mathematics of weather gives rise to the butterfly effect...a butterfly flapping its wings changes the weather after a time from what it would have been.
So why do we get things like worlds where Alexander the Great's Empire still stands and Jesus of Nazareth was never born, but Adolf Schicklgruber is a famous artist and convert to Judaism?

The justification in Infinite Worlds is that the worlds don't exist in isolation from each other. They influence each other to cause these kind of coincidences and to attract worlds who have that kind of synchronicity. Which why there's a world of intelligent dinosaurs where every nation has exactly the same boundaries as those of Homeworld few years previous.