I'm not convinced about this reasoning - it seems a bit too much like Pascal's wager. He estimates the probability of this at about 1% and suggests that we should therefore spend about 1% of GDP on preparing for the possibility. In the last part of the book Tegmark moves away from his ideas on what threats are facing humanity. I felt that Tegmark didn't properly address this issue, although it does seem to get some attention is his somewhat more technical paper: The Mathematical Universe If the universe is based on mathematics it is the symmetry, and indeed the beauty of the mathematical system which is important. There exists a universe consisting just of the events of Alice in Wonderland. He shows that anything can be encoded as a mathematical systems, and as I see it this means that 'anything goes'. There's another big problem I see with Tegmark's idea though. Here I was in for a bit of surprise: Tegmark doesn't trust infinities either, and explains that his ideas are based on finite systems. My first objection to this was what I call the 'dash for infinity', that is adopting infinite mathematical systems as descriptions of physics just for the sake of it when there doesn't seem to be any physical justification for it. This says that universes don't have to be based on the mathematical structures underlying our universe, other mathematical structures will do just as well. Eventually we get on to Level 4, the main idea of the book. The level 3 multiverse is the well know 'Many worlds' of quantum theory. Level 2 is based on eternal inflation - the idea of a constantly inflating system, from which universes like ours are continually being created. This is the Level 1 multiverse, and for the rest of the book Tegmark describes the different multiverse levels he has identified.
This means that there will be many parts very similar to the one we live in, and so many near copies of you and me. This leads on to cosmological inflation, which implies our universe is much bigger than what we can see. Then there's the microwave background, and Tegmark explains how studying this has greatly helped us to understand the beginning of the universe. Soon we're into modern cosmology, looking at where different structures in our universe came from. Main reviewThe book continues by going through the list of questions that Tegmark has posed for himself.
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