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).

[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.

[tanksoldier]

Quantum mechanics postulates that every possibility exists, but some possibilities are more probable than others.

There might be one universe where the Big Bang never happened... but millions more where it did. Conversely, maybe the Big Bang is highly improbable and we’re the only reality where it happened.

In game terms certain paths in history are more probable. That results in (for example) Orville and Wilbur Wright existing in many different realities, despite probable variations in their histories and origins.

IW has an additional mechanic whereby realities are synchronized in some fashion. There seem to be “prime” reality, or realities, and everything else is a variation from that.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Because chrono mechanics is a sapient force and likes messing with people.

[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.

[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.

[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