Another World In Dr. Pangloss's Candide

We are not nearly as unique as we have been told, even though you are likely to be the only person on this Earth with your exact mind. But what if I told you there were other Earths, each with other versions of you who walk, talk, and act just like you, with slightly different decisions that coincide with the major difference of that world. There may even be a world in which you were your generation’s Einstein, or their OJ Simpson. In Candide by Voltaire, Dr. Pangloss states that we as a people live in the best of all possible worlds, when in fact there are infinite possibilities, some better and some worse than our own. In my project, I used this theory to illustrate that we do not live in the best or worst world, but instead we live in one
I used a map of what the country looked like in the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle. In the show, the United States lost the arms race and never dropped bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The white area in the center of the map is where the Axis Powers dropped the nuclear bomb, and is too radiated for life to prosper. This piece argues that we do live in a better world being as, even with the deaths of those living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with their future generations, it doesn’t compare to the death and devastation that would occur if the Nazis became the largest power in the world.

Next, I used the idea web to show three different major global events and how they could have had better/worse outcomes. For example, what if Martin Luther King Jr. had never been apart of the civil rights movement? On the other side of the spectrum, what if no one had killed Martin Luther King Jr.? These both differ greatly from reality. I did this to represent the idea that we shouldn’t worry about whether or not our world is the best possibility, for it could be just as awful as it could be