20200206h Day 37: NPR Interview with David Quammen Notes Mapped to the Multiverse

Some points to consider from the NPR interview on the novel coronavirus with science write David Quammen from a couple days ago:

1. 2019-nCoV case fatality rate of (currently) 2% is in the range that should be taken seriously.
2. The limited number of masks should be reserved for those who are sick and health care workers. They are not that effective in protecting healthy people.
3. The chances are there – how big we don’t know – that a pandemic will one day infect and kill a large percentage of the world population.

Of these points, all involve probabilities. Nearby universes surround us with slight changes in probability. Farther away universes have larger changes in probability. So, a nearby universe would be one where the 2019-nCoV case fatality rate is 3% instead of 2% and a farther away one would be where it is 20% instead of 2%. The effectiveness of people wearing masks can also be similar or different in near and far universes, respectively. And the chance a pandemic will one day infect and kill a large percentage of the world population can also be used to order universes along a continuum. Each of these three measures can be thought of as a different dimension in the parallel universe space. As an example, considering only these three measures, one could visualize a 3-D space of universes by assigning number 1 to the X-axis, number 2 to the Y-axis, and number 3 to the Z-axis.

Author: J. Sands Loch

Student and teacher of reality in all its forms. I self-published my personal experience of discovering and trying to understand and use a model of reality based on the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Surfing the Multiverse: Finding Happiness One Universe at a Time Available on Kindle and from Amazon, and found in blog post form at: SurfingTheUniverse.com View all posts by J. Sands Loch