The Mandela Effect: Real or Imagined

Because it is an observed phenomenon one cannot declare it doesn't exist. Therefore, it can be both real AND imagined. At lease WHAT it is can be imagined. Perusing the blogs, Facebook pages and Youtube vids there are a myriad range of mundane to fantastical explanations for the experience.

On the mundane end of the spectrum there is the idea that some people misremember a fact or event and find dozens to hundreds of other people who similarly misremember it and they share their experiences in internet forums. As such, the Internet facilitates a filter-effect to bring together these people.

On the opposite extreme, there is the hypothesis we are now living in a virtual simulation after the Earth has been destroyed in some unspecified calamity such as an asteroid strike or alien invasion. Taking this idea to the extreme extreme, maybe our entire existence has never been anything but a simulation. In that case, there is no There out there to go back to and we ought to get used to being a simulation.

Along the continuum of possible causes of the Mandela Effect there are explanations of varying complexity. Below are a few of those possibilities.

Different time-lines of cause and effect are colliding due to natural aging of the Universe. Fruit Loops and Froot Loops, Berenstain and Berenstein, Sex in the City and Sex and the City, et al. each exist in their respective time-lines and are now confusing us here in this time-line. I suppose the people in the other time-line are equally confounded by their disparities.

Going a bit further afield, the Mandela Effect may be the result of entire QuantumUniverses merging long enough for a few people to get trapped on the wrong side of the membrane. They remember their history and tell us about it. In their version, South America is farther to the west than it is here. Australia had another land mass off its western shore although no one has come up with its name yet.

Some people suggest that the effect is man-made and possibly due to the activities at the CERN facilities on the French-Swiss border. The CERN high-energy experiments are hypothesized to be opening alternate dimensions, merging time-lines and messing with the past. Calls to shut down the plant fall of deaf ears even as more examples of the Mandela Effect are catalogs and debated ad naseum.

If the alterations of our past is the real cause of the Effect and that cause is natural, we can only get used to it happening.

If it is a man-made Effect (possibly by the activities at CERN) we can likewise not stop the changes from happening. The suggested impacts of the CERN experiments ripple across time and universe membranes. We would have to stop the CERN lab in every universe and in all time in order to eradicate it. Just the mere suggestion of stopping CERN in all Universes creates more Universes where it must be stopped. Since today's CERN activities alter our past so would future CERN activities (both here and in all Universes.) Oddly, even past CERN activity can still alter out past as well as our future.

Sadly, if we all have been relocated to the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way from the Orion arm by some superior civilization, there is no going back. Planet Krypton exploded and Kal-El cannot go home without traveling back it time to a point before it went boom.

If you wake up in a different Universe or time-line, you best get used to your new life because unless you are Jim Belucci in Mr. Destiny, George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life or Jack Campbell in Family Man, when you see the alternate life you don't get to go back.