Reading the Escape from Planet Earth section of Last Ergs, I think this is not the intended interpretation.DanielH wrote:But also, if all the worlds were identical, and then an event happened with moving between universes, only worlds ±1 would have had a different experience than any of the others. All of this difference in culture must have spread out FROM those worlds at some point.
It's not quite clear what's happening in 'Verse Chorus (where the event that distinguishes Universe Zero from the others occurs), but my impression is that it doesn't just differentiate Zero from the rest, it distinguishes each universe individually--they're all identical prior to that event (which is why the vast majority have inhabited Earths), but not afterwards. I think the idea is that Mitch passes through and interacts with each universe at slightly different times just prior to being imprisoned in Zero, and that difference gets magnified by the butterfly effect, or something like that.Almost every conceivable eventuality is happening out there on the strand somewhere, on some Earth. Every historical path has been taken, for better or worse.
(This is all fresh in my mind from recently reading the Chronological Cut of Fine Structure, which makes a lot of this significantly clearer.)
