Not really. Niche in terms of the totality of academic physics, not niche in terms of their disproportionate representation in the ‘media’. But hey, fantasy is always more interesting than fact.
It's a "fun" theory. Given the ability to annihilate ourselves (with nukes), the likelihood that we haven't goes down with time. In this set of universes, any where we haven't destroyed ourselves at a given point in time is less likely to exist (and therefore more strange) than ones where we have.
It's a thing from a comic. A variation of quantum suicide which says that we're in a weird reality now because all the high-probability realities have no humans in because of global thermonuclear war breaking out during the Cold War.
Could we have a really weird apocalypse instead? Everything in endingology is so drab. What if every third molecule turned into a live cat, and when you die of cat it triggers a random cascade which causes the nearest hundred cats to become frozen instants in your timeline?
In Guth’s original version of cosmic inflation, our universe was formed by vacuum decay, explaining the Big Bang. But it turns out regular vacuum decay is too messy, you need a special sort of vacuum decay (“new inflation”, Linde & Steinhardt) to create an interesting Big Bang universe…
Terrance McKenna had a kind of groovy version of the apocalypse. Something like we're accelerating towards a magnetic singularity 'a tractor or dwell point in the temporal dimension'...
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