For someone who never toke any physics (me) superposition simply descibes not knowing. If you open the box and find a decayed cat corpse isn't it safe to say the critter has been dead for some time - which forensics can estimate? As I read the theory it says the cat is both alive and dead till you open it. The rotting stench would tell you that it was dead during some portion of that elapsed time. As to the multiverse theory it would be an incredible number of universes. Think most of us could imagine a better one to exist in than this. And Sybil thought she had problems?

As to the latter bit of your Question/Statement, as we don't really have a choice as to in which universe to be born in, there is no use sweating over it and wasting precious moments!

The superposition theory...
Never heard of that! Perhaps it is the theory which tells us to think of all the possibilities.

Hope I've helped (If you were actually looking for an answer!)

This is the way I understand it. I'm not an expert and haven't studied any details of Observer-Free Quantum Theory, but this explanation makes sense to me:

The idea behind this theory is that particles propagate as waves of probability. Until a particle interacts with something else, it can't be said to be in any one place. Rather, it exists as an expanding wave front, and at any one point it has some probability of interacting with whatever its wave front subsumes. When that interaction occurs, the wave function is said to "collapse" because the particle now behaves as if it now is at one particular point in space, rather than a nebulous sort of wave.

Now, Schroedinger's Box isn't an appropriate analogy for how this stuff works. Schroedinger himself regarded this thought experiment as a bit perverse and, like you, grappled with its meaning. He and his contemporaries were looking for an interpretation of Quantum Theory that avoided blurry macroscopic states like the live/dead cat.

There were multiple attempts. Einstein had something close even before Quantum Theory was developed, and later (1927) deBroglie had written down a theory that made it possible to talk about probabilities of intermediate states between the firing of the alpha particle and the death of the cat. It seems silly now, but finding a mathematical expression of intermediate observables was difficult -- Schroedinger would have preferred this approach if he had found it first.

For whatever reason, though, deBroglie's formulation didn't catch on. It wasn't until the 1950s that the theory enjoyed a revival when a guy named Bohm discovered it independently. The theory, now called the deBroglie-Bohm model or Bohmian Mechanics, provides a refinement of Quantum Theory and serves to illuminate what it really means.

In short, the cat is either alive or dead before you open the box. (By the way, if you smell the rotting corpse, that counts as an observation by you that the cat is dead, making the determination of the state of the system possible without ever opening the box.)

Thanks Mack. I just find this interesting because it seems to be a different approach to nearly everything. I have no background for it but sense it is likely to prove and disprove a great many things in the next 20 to 40 years.