World Types
World Types
There are many different kinds of realities. It is likely not all variants have been discovered.Alternate Earths
Very roughly, these are worlds that seem to be some variant on Earth, if only tenuously.Timeline Shift
These worlds appear identical to Baseline, but at a point back (or forward) in history. They have not yet diverged, but no force seems to keep them from doing so. Explorers have already caused events on some of them (such as shooting Napoleon before his rise to power) that will cause distortions in the future. This also includes worlds in the far distant past, such as Trilobite Tidepool, or in some unimaginable future, like Furnace Creek. (These are categorized as alternate Earths, not wholly alien worlds, via astronomical measurements.)Historical Alternate
This is a world where history went awry at some point within the past few thousand years, but nothing else is changed: Same landmass, same species (modulus a few extinctions more or less as the change requires), etc. There could be very drastic changes, such as a thermonuclear war in the 1950s, but everything up to that point is parallel.Prehistoric Alternate
This world is physically identical to Baseline, and so are the humans who inhabit it, but history changed very far back, before any records of civilization. The cultures, nations, and languages are totally unconnected to Baseline, though parallel evolution produces some similarities. (Given the same environmental conditions, and the same underlying neural psychology, many similar physical and cultural tools develop.)Physical Alternate
The world has some dramatic change from Earth's physical structure. Continents have different shapes, or are missing or moved, or the climate is drastically different. Recent changes, such as a nuclear winter or runaway global warming, fall into Divergent History. Physical Alternates tend to have wildly divergent histories, as the presence of an Australia-sized land mass in the middle of the Atlantic, or the poles never dropping below freezing, is going to shift everything around.Alternate Dominant
Some species other than H. Sapiens rules this world. Sometimes, there are illogical parallels, such as where the dominant species are humanoid ducks, but they have a culture and society identical to modern humans. Most of the time, though, even if the landmasses are the same, different species produce wholly different histories.Alternate Physics
This is a very broad category, and can subsume others. These are worlds where magic (or what is called magic) works, or worlds where anti-gravity metals can lift Queen Victoria's dreadnoughts into the ether between worlds, or where a normal human can put on shiny spandex and juggle a tank. Items from such worlds rarely function on Baseline. Rarely.Fictives
One of the strangest discoveries was that worlds exist where works of fiction are historical fact. The first such confirmed was a near-parallel to Baseline, and only a casual browse through a library revealed that, on this world, Huckleberry Finn was a childhood friend of Chief Justice Thomas Sawyer, whose experiences informed Sawyer's progressive politics. Samuel Clemens was a journalist of mild importance, but published no fiction. Other discoveries soon followed, along with similar worlds where historical people or events from Baseline were mere stories: One where there was no "Titanic" until James Cameron decided to make a movie about a romance on a doomed ship, and another where Thomas Edison was a tall-tale character, the inventing equivalent of Paul Bunyan, with different scientists and engineers creating most of the same devices in roughly the same time period.Non-Terrestrial
These are worlds not related to Earth in any way. While they may be easily habitable by humans, they do not seem to have any history, even billions of years back, in common with Baseline. These worlds may have human or human-seeming inhabitants, but completely different geography, or orbit a star different from Sol. Some may even be worlds within Baseline's reality, but located in other parts of the universe. This is considered unlikely.Pocket Worlds
In 2016, the first "Pocket World" was found, a disk 5 miles across and a quarter mile thick, with some oak trees, grass, grazing animals, and a small log cabin. At the edge of the disk was an impenetrable shell. Night and day cycles, and weather, occurred without cause. Air was constantly refreshed. The cabin held no furnishings or tools that might have hinted at the owners, other than that the construction indicated something the size and shape of a human. Since then, other such "pocket worlds" have been found.
Some have speculated this world was in a larger, complete, reality; Baseline explorers simply couldn't get past the boundaries. Others claim it was part of a simulation or 'holodeck', inside some vastly larger system, like a Jupiter Brain. Neither hypothesis has much support other than the desire to believe "pocket universes" can't exist. Still, they can't be ruled out as possibilities.
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