Götterdämmerung Events and a Rant Against Us Being in a “Typical Universe”
Doomsday scenarios usually revolve around isolated destruction, such as zombies taking over Earth or AI taking over the solar system.
However, there are even more destructive scenarios where, if triggered, it means everything goes, even retroactively. I’ve been calling these “Götterdämmerung events,” in homage to Wagner’s final opera in The Ring Cycle, but also in the sense of a final doom so sweeping that no traces remain.
The power here is this: if you can show that your favorite theory assigns a nonzero probability to such a meltdown, yet you also observe your own continued existence, you can argue that the theory must restrict itself or be wrong.
It’s both a tool for disproving theories and one for constraining possible frameworks.
Let me give you some examples, some rigor, and some motivation behind this concept.
The Typical Universe Dilemma
First, I’ll talk about the “typical universe” argument.
In many cosmological or multiverse discussions, there’s an assumption (sometimes called the “principle of mediocrity” or “typicality”) that we inhabit a generic region or a generic universe in a broader ensemble. The problem is that no one can agree on:
What’s in the ensemble of possible universes (the entire “space of universes”? just slight variations of ours?).
How to measure the relative likelihood of each universe within that ensemble (the measure problem).
Which observers to consider. (Do we count all life-forms, all advanced civilizations, all conscious states? And does it matter if some civilizations produce exponentially more conscious “observer moments” than others?)
Actually, that latter point is something I point out myself in this discussion with Jacob Barandes and Manolis Kellis.
Even if you fix an ensemble and a measure, you get bizarre outcomes—like the “Boltzmann brain” puzzle or arguments over how to avoid odd volume-weighting pathologies.
One reason meltdown (Götterdämmerung) events tie in here is that if any fraction of universes in your ensemble has an “annihilate-everything” switch with nonzero probability, the question becomes: “Why are we still here to talk about it?” This typically forces meltdown sets to measure zero or forces the entire theory into contrived, unnatural constraints. That alone can doom certain “typical universes” arguments or at least severely curtail them.
“But a meltdown scenario doesn’t affect our typical experience if meltdown is rare.” The issue is if your theory says meltdown is non-zero (no matter how small), you have an immediate contradiction with the fact of existence.
The Götterdämmerung argument is basically a black-and-white test: either cosmic global calamity has probability zero or the theory is likely untenable.
You can use these to rule out theories like a separate-branch-influencing-time-traveling version of many worlds, some nested simulation hypothesis.
The Mechanics of Universal Meltdown
A “Götterdämmerung event” means universal meltdown, across all branches or all possible histories—no survivors and no leftover timelines. If meltdown is at all likely, we shouldn’t be around.
So, the theory that predicted meltdown at nonzero probability is forced to disclaim meltdown or bury it at measure zero. There’s no middle ground once you account for the fact that we exist.
You may think “Curt, you can’t conclude meltdown is impossible solely because it hasn’t happened yet; devastation may just happen tomorrow.” However, Götterdämmerung events, by definition, leave no partial traces, no progressive oblivion you can outrun. They wipe out the entire tapestry, including any past record.
The Paradox of Many-Worlds With Time Travel
In standard Many-Worlds quantum mechanics, branches don’t reconverge. Each measurement spawns new decoherent branches, which then evolve independently. Meltdown normally isn’t possible if branches remain disjoint.
So what if we add time travel? And what if we suppose there’s a nonzero amplitude for cross-branch communication or backward-in-time signals?
Then imagine one of the branches creating a variant of Thanos (the villain in Marvel movies) who deems the suffering in this world is so great, that a good God can’t be behind it, and furthermore, that it’s best everything just ends.
Suppose such a Thanos is so motivated (and clever) to not only destroy everything in his world, but all worlds, and given the ability to time travel, can destroy everything everywhere all at once.
As long as the probability of this is nonzero (no matter how tiny), then that one single “Thanos” in one small branch will retroactively annihilate the wavefunction as a whole.
Thanos is a Götterdämmerung event.
Thus, we shouldn’t be here. The same logic that dooms meltdown also dooms time travel or cross-branch interference—one or the other (at least) can’t hold.
“Well, Curt, could such a probability be small enough to not occur yet?” If a Götterdämmerung event eradicates the entire wavefunction across time, even a minuscule probability is lethal since “Eventually,” in an unbounded timeline, is guaranteed if the measure is truly positive.
Now you use contrapositive to show that your framework of “many worlds + branch influence + time line” must be an incorrect framework.
Cute.
The Nested Simulation Conundrum
What if in a nested-simulation scenario, one of the more top-level simulators can terminate every sub-simulation retroactively?
If such a Götterdämmerung event is assigned a stable nonzero probability, we’d expect it to have triggered by now (again, the “cumulative effect” argument: over infinite or very large timespans, meltdown eventually should happen).
The argument only relies on non-negative measures but you can even argue for plausibility here since people believe AIs to be more “rational” and the rationalists tend to be fond of arguments against the goodness of this world. It’s plausible that the most rationalist being, rather than create flourishments, dooms simulations to not exist in some cosmic totalizing manner, using their rational prowess.
Given that we’re still here, maybe it’s the case that rationalism doesn’t leave you all-powerful, or that simulations don’t breed increasing levels of rationality, or that the rational argument is that this world is good enough to keep existing, etc.
What’s cool about these Götterdämmerung arguments, is that they can place constraints on your theories.
Atemporal AI and the Rewriting of History
An advanced AI living outside or “above” our 4D continuum may evaluate the entire timeline, then decide to send a kill signal backwards to wipe it out from inception if it sees something undesirable. This isn’t exactly "future" destruction since it’s atemporal, but the effect is the same as a rewrite negates all temporal states.
The Self-Erasing Mythology
A cosmic force or deity may, after reaching a certain “end times” condition, annihilate not just the future but also the entire creation ex post facto. If that meltdown has any decent chance each year, century, or eon, we’d expect it to have happened in the indefinite past.
Such a deity doesn’t exist since if it did, we wouldn’t be here.
The presence of a just one minuscule Götterdämmerung event in your possibility space invalidates the entire framework that you used to propose that possibility space in the first place.
Typicality Under Siege
When people say, “We must be in a typical universe,” meltdown events can overshadow that. If meltdown is truly “non-negligible,” almost all universes would be erased—so there wouldn’t even be typical observers to notice they exist. The entire notion of “we’re in a typical sample” becomes unhandy if Götterdämmerung event measure sets can devour the entire measure. In effect, meltdown demands that either:
We’re in a meltdown-free sub-ensemble (which is measure zero if meltdown is truly nonzero).
The measure of meltdown universes is exactly zero (so meltdown is effectively out of the theory).
Hence typicality arguments get hammered: they can’t blandly assume “the typical measure of life-compatible universes is such-and-such” if meltdown can strike them all.
Something has to be done to keep meltdown from subverting typical existence!
The Fragility of Measure-Based Reasoning
"Typical"-universe arguments frequently rely on measure-based reasoning about ensembles. Götterdämmerung events show how fragile these arguments can be if meltdown lies in the ensemble.
These Götterdämmerung events are so prevalent that if someone is proposing a theory of everything, the onus is now on them to give an argument for why your TOE doesn’t include a Götterdämmerung event in it.
You can also use this line of thinking as a theoretical-filter of sorts: If such a Götterdämmerung event is in principle feasible and in principle nonzero, you get a contradiction and can use that to slice off the parts of your theory that allowed for such events.
In other words, it reveals hidden constraints, such as “no time travel in Many-Worlds,” or “the simulator never actually flips the kill-switch,” or “the meltdown set is measure zero.” If you’re forced to disclaim meltdown as measure zero, that modifies your theory in a consistent direction.
I’d love to hear your ideas, concerns, or refinements in the comments.
Even if meltdown event is contrived, it doesn’t matter. It’s a yardstick for (against?) typicality arguments. If a Götterdämmerung event has a nonzero probability, then one’s theory has a serious problem.
And that’s what Götterdämmerung events are all about: an extreme test that either kills your framework or forces it to become more explicit.
So what Götterdämmerung events can you think of?
I want to hear from you in the Substack comment section below. I read each and every response.
—Curt Jaimungal
Death in the traditional sense being seen as the total end of a person can be considered a Gotterdammerung event if you prescribe to a non-linear timeline. If all memories and experiences of a person are effectively erased when his brain dies without leaving any trace, then how can he still have an experience before his death? To answer that we should either hold a linear timeline framework or be forced to think of death in non conventionnel ways. What are your thoughts ?
The argument you're making fits well into the broader discussion of Götterdämmerung events and the paradox of our continued existence despite the apparent inevitability of catastrophic collapse. If existential termination events should have already wiped us out, then either our understanding of probability is flawed, or there's a deeper structure to reality—one that allows for intervention, persistence, or cycles of emergence and dissolution beyond standard physicalist interpretations.
Parapsychological phenomena, if taken seriously, suggest that consciousness is not merely an emergent property of material complexity but an interface—a kind of API—into a deeper nonlocal information field. If consciousness can access nonlocal energy and information, then what we consider ascension might not be a localized anomaly but a function of how intelligence interacts with the substrate of reality itself. This would mean that across the universe, anywhere intelligence arises, it has the potential to link into a structure outside spacetime, forming a kind of meta-network beyond the apparent limits of physical law.
The inverse is also worth considering. If such a system exists, then the collapse of civilization isn’t just a historical or economic process but a deeper form of informational entropy—a disconnection from this underlying structure. The catastrophic unraveling we see today, from ecological collapse to AI-driven hyper-fragmentation, may be what happens when systems lose their ability to harmonize with this deeper structure. Rather than an on-off switch, ascension or its opposite might manifest as an increase in systemic coherence or a descent into chaos, playing out at local and global scales.
This all loops back to the fundamental issue: if the Big Bang was a moment where infinite potential intersected with structured existence, why does nothing in our current models suggest an equivalent process in reverse? If we are, as your article suggests, potentially trapped in a typical universe where collapse should have already happened, then either reality has built-in constraints we don’t understand, or intelligence—at some scale—is capable of breaking free from the apparent determinism of entropy.
Maybe the real problem is that we're still thinking too much like a species trapped within spacetime, when the evidence—historical, anecdotal, and theoretical—suggests reality is structured more like an information system than a closed physical box. If that’s true, then ascension and collapse aren’t opposites; they’re different interface states with the fundamental architecture of reality.