Question regarding the Shards... *story spoilers*

[Hazama999]

Hello! First time making a thread on this end of the forums (I think). Being that 5.0 had a lot to say about the Shards and their relationship with the Source, there was something that popped in my mind and I wanted some clarification on it.

Now, I own both lore books, though I confess I have not had the chance to read them in full due to time restrictions (school), so forgive me if the answer can be found, clear as day, in either one of them. My question is: for the sake of practicality, are we to think of the Shards and the Source as different dimensions? The reason I ask is that the game is very... well, geocentric, for the lack of a better word, when the Shards and Source are brought up. It seems to me that what lies beyond the planet itself is rarely brought up (last time I heard anything about it was in the Omega raid series).

Not much of an analogy here, but if hypothetically speaking we were to have the same situation happen to Earth (as in, our Earth), would Earth-2, Earth-3, etc etc have their own versions of jovian planets and other celestial bodies? And again, the reason I ask this is that the game focuses a whole lot on the planet but I wonder about the things beyond it.

[TankHunter678]

The way they act is the shards and source are treated as separate dimensions separated by the "rift" which is why Emet-Selch was surprised by the fact that the Crystal Exarch could summon the WoL to the source with their body intact. As normally to cross over the dimensional barrier you need to be just a soul, which is why the ascians need to acquire a body every time they go from source to shard or shard to shard or shard to source. Also note that in order for aether to flow from a shard to the source the dimensional barrier needs to be weakened to allow the aether through, otherwise it has nowhere to go and just creates a void like the Thirteenth shard currently is.

[Iscah]

Not much of an analogy here, but if hypothetically speaking we were to have the same situation happen to Earth (as in, our Earth), would Earth-2, Earth-3, etc etc have their own versions of jovian planets and other celestial bodies? And again, the reason I ask this is that the game focuses a whole lot on the planet but I wonder about the things beyond it.

That's been debated for a while, but I don't think we've ever gotten an answer.

The shards can definitely be thought of as different dimensions for practicality's sake, and seem to occupy the same space at different 'frequencies' - but it's not clear how far those dimensions extend, or (if they're localised) what happens if you try to approach them from the outside.

(My best logical guess is that you'd only see the Source, but there's nothing to support or deny it at this point, except perhaps that we do know the Source has received extraterrestrial visitors - Omega and Midgardsormr - who arrived after the Sundering. But we lack enough knowledge about what's on the other shards.)

[kidalutz]

parallel dimensions would have thier own space yes.

[Anonymoose]

The phrase "Dimensional Plane" has been used by dev. team members in the past, though Shadowbringers also tightened and polished a lot of lore so the specifics could stand to be stated clearly once more for the record, lol. But, yes, assuming that each shard exists on a different "dimensional frequency" is a safe bet. We also don't yet know how far away from the planet the "shattered cosmic fabric" extends, yet.

[TinyRedLeaf]

If hypothetically speaking we were to have the same situation happen to Earth (as in, our Earth), would Earth-2, Earth-3, etc etc have their own versions of jovian planets and other celestial bodies? And again, the reason I ask this is that the game focuses a whole lot on the planet but I wonder about the things beyond it.

Well... if you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then theoretically speaking, there are indeed an infinite number of "shards" of Earth out there, each contained in a universe unto itself.

In fact, we don't have to go far beyond Shadowbringers to see an example of this "weird science" in action. G'raha Tia, by all rights, shouldn't exist in the First. And in preventing the Eighth Umbral Calamity, by all rights, the timeline in the Source that led to his awakening will no longer come to pass. He is now effectively a person adrift in time and space.

But then, how is it that G'raha Tia continues to exist in the First? Well, if we accept the many-worlds interpretation, then all that really happens is that a new timeline without the Eighth Umbral Calamity has been created. The former, blighted timeline still exists out there somewhere, but it's no longer connected to the objective reality that our characters experience, or will experience.

Paradoxical? Yes, very much so. Which is why I'm not very fond of stories that get into timey-wimey stuff. It's rarely handled in a way that makes satisfactory sense.

[Iscah]

But then, how is it that G'raha Tia continues to exist in the First? Well, if we accept the many-worlds interpretation, then all that really happens is that a new timeline without the Eighth Umbral Calamity has been created.

I'm running on the theory that we are NOT in a "many worlds" scenario, but one that naturally tends to a single stable timeline, particularly since the Alexander raids showed a stable time loop in operation - but it's also canonically stated there that time travel destabilises the timeline and (if I'm interpreting it right) introduces many potential offshoots until it's resolved and the loop completes. However, in this instance we seem to have broken the loop and made it go off in a different direction - with G'raha's ongoing existence basically propping the old timeline open and forcing both versions to exist when there should only be one.

So, not infinitely many worlds, just two.

("Many worlds" is depressing. No matter what you do, you're just in the one version of the world that got lucky, while the bad stuff you were trying to prevent still happened somewhere else.)

[Eyvind]

While the devs have never been 100% clear on the parallel dimensions stuff and how it works (are there Jovian planets etc), the stuff they've said tends to lean towards different planes - dimensions "at a different frequency" as folks say.

That said, there is one piece of evidence that I never see mentioned in these threads, and which is even more stark in reference to Shadowbringers where so much emphasis is put on the night sky in one of these worlds: look up. There are stars there. What are those stars? There is at least an empyrean sphere containing our solar system, if not a whole galaxy or universe, because there has to be somewhere for the stars to be.

What might be a neat experiment would be to snap a screenshot looking at some common monument - say the crystal tower or Eulmore/Limsa - and see if the stars line up identically or are different. If they line up, then we're talking about duplicated solar systems/galaxies/universe. If not, then the "void beween worlds" might be space, though with very different rules.

Of course, this opens up lore implications of its own. If every shard is a universe comparable in size to our own, then there might be whole worlds of alien lifeforms consumed by the floods of light or darkness.

[Enkidoh]

As far as the night sky goes, there has been a lot of player discussion and study on constellations and planetary movements, resulting in some surprising discoveries (in so much as the game's sky box doesn't really realistically portray actual celestial mechanics) - this started back in 1.0 in this thread, and led into this thread early in ARR (although the ARR thread kind of faded out like a brown dwarf). Not to mention the AST Job quests go into quite a bit of info about certain constellations... and they don't appear to line up with any real world constellation.

Having said that, I'd long noticed one apparent constellation that was always near the moon that I tentatively called 'The Eorzean Cross' due to it's strong resembellance to a real-life constellation Australians like myself are very familar with.... only to belatedly discover levelling AST that it was actually considered part of another constellation and wasn't called that or even regarded as it's own seperate constellation. I was most disappointed.

So by all indications there are constellations in Hydaelyn's night sky, but they don't appear to closely follow real life constellations at all (Vana'diel's star map in FFXI did not either).

Of course even if they did, would each Shards's night skies line up with each other as well as the Source's? It's hard to say - on one hand I would like to say 'yes', but we just don't know (given they're 'reflections' of the Source it is probable though). One thing that was a part of the Source's night sky for millenia that would never have been in any of the Shard's skies though, was of course Dalamud, given it was an artifical satellite created by the Allag, and well, the Allag never existed in the Shards (it's why the Crystal Tower materiallizing one day in the First was taken with such shock by the residents of that 'plane', no one there knows who built it or where it came from).

[Eyvind]

I was not talking about them lining up with anything in the real world, but if the Source and the Shards line up with one another. If they do, it means their stars have been copied as well, along with whatever the stars are (fires on a crystal shell, an actual galaxy, a whole universe of stellar objects...). It could go a long way to answering the cosmological questions.