Blather Mode On:
Assume for the moment that there is not just an “alternate reality” but an infinite number of them… and that they are accessible. Worlds where the Americans lost the War of Independence, or where the Crusades were successful, or where the Justinian Plague was slightly more powerful and wiped out the entire population of the Old World. Assume further than they can be accessed by some form of technology, able to transfer people across worlds, or even swap bits of terrain. It seems to me that if there are more than just a few accessible alternate timelines, there should be an infinite number of them.
In this sort of scenario, you’d imagine that most of the stories would be something like The Man In The High Castle, with high drama involving agents, scientists, historians going and checking out timelines where history diverged in exciting ways: the Nazis won World War II, or the space race was a rampaging success, that sort of thing. But then I had a thought: what if you could find a timeline where, for whatever reason, humanity simply wasn’t. The Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago successfully wiped out the species, say. The Earth is just like our Earth, just… no people. And if there are in fact an infinite number of timelines, there would be an infinite number of these Earth, virtually indistinguishable from each other.
If these worlds exist and are accessible… *imagine* the land rush. With an infinite number of worlds, you will have individuals escaping to their own private world. You will have criminal justice systems dumping convicts onto their own private worlds. And you might have whole populations deciding that the thing to do is swap their chunk of land here on Earth for the chunk of land on some uninhabited Earth. Your entire city, county, state, nation could find itself, willingly or not, suddenly the sole occupants of a pristine world. For some this would be a nightmare. For others, this would be the answer to a series of prayers.
What brings this up? Recent events:
I can imagine that as societies tear themselves apart there would be a *hell* of a drive to flee to other worlds. There is a hell of an incentive right now for first worlders to flee from incipient societal collapse… but the problem is there is nowhere left on Earth to go. Few enough places in the first world have the room to accept a million South African farmers and shop owners… and even if they could squeeze them it, it’d be right next to a million third world refugees.
The rational thing to do would be to cut your territory off from the world for, say, a year, and see if the resources within the boundaries are up to the task, or if you need more stuff. If it works… flip the switch and suddenly your region ceases to exist, replaced with natural terrain and foliage and some rather surprised critters. Your region appears on a pristine world without outside forces trying to destroy you.
I can see anything from “compounds” of racial or religious extremists out in the boonies wanting to go their own way, on up to entire nations. All of Palestine, perhaps… or all of Israel. At first it would be easy for Earthly nations to simply say “screw ’em, let ’em go,” but if this sort of thing gets *really* popular, some counties or regions might start finding themselves running short on population or wealth. If, say, all of Nebraska vanished, there would be jokes about nobody knowing for a few weeks; but the reality is that Interstate 80 would go with it and transcontinental transport would become kinda challenging.
There would also be exciting new industries: just as there are today companies that sell you stuff to help you survive a disaster, there would be companies that would sell you pre-packed Restart Civilization Kits. These would almost by definition have to be a *large* number of intermodal shipping containers filled with various technologies… power, mining, transport, medical, etc. A large empty field could be filled with hundreds of these, then thousands or tens of thousands of evacuees show up and the whole place goes “poof,” replaced by another empty field, ready to be refilled with Restart Civilization Kits and a bunch more refugees.
And then there’s a flip side to this sort of problem: if there are an infinite number of desirable empty Earths all more or less the same, there should be an infinite number of Earths just like ours. For every person planning on fleeing to an empty world, there would be an infinite number of the exact same guy all planning to go. When dealing with infinities, an infinite number of refugees would still all find themselves alone on their own private worlds. But there might be occasional problems: let’s say Israel decides to wander off to their own private world, only to find that they’re sharing an otherwise empty world with North Korea, even though the North Korea from Israel’s original world hadn’t actually left.
And then there’s *this* wrinkle: time travel. Presumably with an infinite number of worlds to go to, you could dial in a world just like ours, but at whatever point in the past (or future). You’d have people gathering together the technology to build the universe shifting tech and going back in time. Neo-Nazis going back to 1935 Germany to translate Nazi Germany to an empty world. Or Imperial Japan. Or the Aztecs, the Navaho, Vikings, Druidic Ireland, you name it.
Netflix: where’s my money.