Crashing The Gate

IN ONE OF HIS MANY MASTERFUL NOVELS, science ficton writer Robert Silverberg creates a character who succinctly aritculates what most of us are probably already aware of, and might even understand, if only intuitively. Every decision we make, every action we take, opens the door to a universe which would never have come into existence had we made a different choice, even a slightly different choice of seeming insignficance. We open a door for a young lady to allow her to enter the building before we do, and we end up speaking to her, getting to know her, dating her, marrying her, having a family with her,and raising a large family of successful children whose actions individually an collectively change the world. The responsibility of raising our family makes us a better man, more responsible, and not only our children but we ourselves contribute to society in ways we never would have otherwise. We barge through the door ahead of her, ignoring courtesy, and we never speak to her nor meet her, and we spend our life single, with no wife, no children, and no meaningful influence in the world through our heirs or our own action, adrift in a life of mundane underachievement. You can easily see where this is leading, and can grasp, if only abstractly, its multivaried ramifications. And, stunningly, the same principle applies not only to a simple one time decision whether to behave politely or rudely, but to every other decision we make througout our entire lives; from the obviously important decision to the most minor ones. The characterr in Silverberg's novel, titled "The Gate of worlds", calls the trillions of possible universes brought into being or not brought into being by every action an inaction of every living creature on Earth "The Gate of Worlds". We stand at every moment in our lives at the entrance to this gate of possible futures, a trillion possible futures awaiting the outcome of every small deed, universes which will never exist, and the universe which actually comes into existence. To complicate matters,Siverbrgg imagines a gate of worlds in whcih all possible universes exist, but which we in our own lives never see or enter. the entire world stands at the gate of worlds. More amazing still, perticipation in the gate of worlds is not limited to only human beings. The butterfly flaps its wings, a bee stings a cow, the herd stampedes,a wind current is jolted to life, which grows as it circulates into warmer regions of the atmosphere, and a hurricane either happens or doesn't happen. The number of possible worlds on the other side of the gate thus becomes infinite, or nearly so, as infinite as the number of particles of matter in the universe,and, in some place unknown to us, each of them plays out its fate. Einstein said that either everyting is a miracle, or nothing is. Well, since something, somewhere must surely be a mirale, everything is. When Einstein was informed that modern physics had found that an electron on one end of the universe can and does communicate with an electron at the other end of the universe, he called it "Spooky action at a distance." He may as well have called it a miracle, since he called eevrything a miracle, as he stood at the entrance to the gate of worlds, making his own fate, and the fate of an entire universe, his universe.