• “Why do you think this theory is true?”

• “What does it imply?”

• “What does it predict?”

The failure to highlight this vital insight is partly because of the unusual circumstances of its birth: it only occurred to me in those frantic days, in June and early July of 2022, during which I was thinking through Cosmological Natural Selection from first principles. I had a hard deadline: I needed to generate, refine, and write up my predictions, then post them online, and email them to my subscribers, before the James Webb Space Telescope unveiled its first data on July 12th, 2022. That breakthrough insight became the basis of my (successful) predictions, but I didn’t have the time to explore it at length, and draw attention to it, in the way it deserved. It just became a hastily-written paragraph in a predictions post that was emailed to my 146 subscribers of the time.

This Substack now has over 10,000 subscribers, so 98.5% of them didn’t read that original breakthrough post. Yet it contains the Big Original Idea that led to Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection; the key insight from which all else follows. My successful predictions about the early universe emerge directly from it (and thus my grants and funding flow from it); the Blowtorch Theory of structure formation is built directly on top of it; the big piece on spiral galaxy formation that I’m currently working on starts with it; and, above all else, it’s the key piece of evidence that this theory may be true.

So, I’m going to, finally, separate it out here as a short(ish) post.

BACKGROUND: THE EARLY HISTORY OF COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION

(Yes, I need to recap again for new subscribers – numbers have gone up a lot recently. And yes, if you know the history of Cosmological Natural Selection already, then click here to skip to the “implications” section.)

The brilliant, quirky American physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008) was co-author of the definitive textbook on gravity, and accidental co-inventor (along with a heckler at one of his talks) of the term “black hole”.

In the mid-1970s, Wheeler became fascinated by the fact that cosmology now had two mysteries involving singularities – points where the density of matter went off-the-scale, and where both of our best mathematical theories (general relativity and quantum mechanics) ceased to function, and started spitting out infinities.

One was a black hole, where mass/energy collapsed rapidly to a point, and mysteriously vanished from the bubble of space-time that is our universe.

The other was the Big Bang, where mass/energy emerged mysteriously from a point, and rapidly expanded to form the bubble of space-time that is our universe.

Wheeler pointed out that they looked awfully like the two sides of one process or event, joined at the singularity. One side simply mirrored the other, as though contraction had flipped or “bounced” at the singularity to become expansion.

(A BRIEF ASIDE: This, by the way, is not unprecedented in physics. For example, and to massively oversimplify: during the collapse of a star, the net effect of all the relevant forces flips, in a way that abruptly reverses the inward collapse of the star into the outward expansion of a supernova explosion. The forces themselves don’t flip. It’s just that their various values, and the way they interact at extreme densities, happen to be tuned to values that can generate this extraordinarily powerful reversal – which allows the periodic table of elements, generated by fusion deep in the heart of the star, to be distributed back up out of the star’s enormous gravity well and into the interstellar medium, where it can help build more stars, planets, and ultimately life. Yes, if you’re looking at our universe through an evolutionary lens, that looks awfully like the kind of fine tuning – to otherwise unlikely values, with functional consequences for reproductive success – that you would end up with after a long evolutionary process. But we are getting ahead of ourselves… END OF BRIEF ASIDE.)

As an elegant way to solve the two problems, Wheeler proposed that mass/energy in a parent universe collapsed to form a black hole (thus leaving the bubble of space-time that was the parent universe). It then “bounced” at the singularity, and expanded in a Big Bang, to form a new universe – budding off a new bubble of space-time, outside of, and separate from, its parent universe.

That is, parent universes reproduced through black holes, which “bounced” to form Big Bangs. Each Big Bang was therefore the birth of a new child universe, which grew up to produce more black holes; more child universes.

In the 1990s, another brilliant American theoretical physicist, Lee Smolin, saw a marvellous implication of Wheeler’s idea that had been completely missed by everybody (because theoretical physicists don’t usually read much evolutionary biology; Smolin had been reading some, for fun). Smolin realised that if there was slight variation in the basic parameters of matter in the child universe (rather than the large and random variation assumed by Wheeler), you would automatically get Darwinian evolution of universes. That’s because slight variation allows for inheritance; and some of those slight variations would lead to more black hole production; more reproductive success; more offspring. Those successful variations would therefore be inherited more widely than less successful variations. The successful variations would vary again (slightly) in the next generation, with some variants being even more reproductively successful (and some less); and off we go – Darwinian evolution of universes, with the evolutionary ratchet optimizing for reproductive success. Over time, the majority of universes will come to be fine-tuned for very high levels of black hole production (compared to the evolutionary starting point, where the numbers could be as low as one or two). This seems plausible: our universe has already produced over forty quintillion black holes, just from stellar collapse. (That’s 4×10¹⁹; a four and 19 zeros! For how they worked that out, see Sicilia, Lapi, et al, 2022.) Smolin’s simple and straightforward evolutionary theory of universes became known as Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS), laid out in this paper, and this book.

So, Smolin had uncovered a powerful evolutionary implication, hidden inside Wheeler’s simple model of the reproduction of universes.

But there is a further, huge, implication hidden inside Smolin’s new and improved theory. Lee Smolin didn’t see it at the time because he was a theoretical physicist, not an evolutionary biologist, and so not saturated in the logic of evolution (from which the implication emerges). He was also handicapped by the fact that astronomy had only observed half a dozen or so supermassive black holes at the time he wrote his original paper and book. It was still therefore blithely assumed, by astronomers and cosmologists and theoretical physicists alike, that supermassive black holes must simply be a bunch of (much smaller) stellar-collapse black holes merged together. It just hadn’t occurred to anybody that black holes that large might have a separate, far simpler, formation mechanism.

But that’s exactly what an evolutionary theory of universe implies. This is an extremely important point, but people usually skip over it when I make it, because it’s usually embedded in a more complex post, alongside a lot of other new information; and so it just whizzes past, as one point among many. This time, I’m going to walk through the logic in excruciating detail. And when I’m done, don’t just click through to the next thing in your scroll. Take a moment, and sit with it. Think it through. Test it in your mind.

And if, at the end of all that, you think it’s true, internalise it. Bring it to the conversation around these issues. Because if it’s true, the boundaries of various scientific fields are currently in the wrong place to explore this new knowledge. A lot of things will need to change. And you can help change them.

COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION’S KEY IMPLICATION, AND THUS PREDICTION

The original reproductive mechanism for universes can’t have been stellar-collapse black holes, because stars are complex, orderly structures made of complex, orderly matter; and all the complex, orderly systems we know of are the result of evolution. (Just as the evolutionary history of biological life can’t have started with complex, orderly eukaryotic cells, with their sophisticated, interacting organelles; just as the evolutionary history of communications devices can’t start with the iPhone 17 Pro Max. ) Looked at through this lens, the periodic table itself, with its dozens and dozens of ever more complex elements, clearly must be the result of an evolutionary process. (It is highly suggestive that the elements get more ragged and unstable towards the upper, more complex, and thus more recently evolved, end.) The original ur-matter, in the original ur-universes, however, must have been as simple as it gets. Very pure, very simple matter, with no structure, and building no structure.

Small, efficient, stellar collapse black holes, therefore, generated at the end of a star’s rich and complex lifecycle, are – must be – a later evolutionary breakthrough.

So, think this through from first principles. If our universe is the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process, then every single one of the earlier universes in our direct evolutionary line must have reproduced successfully, by definition.

But the only thing that is unavoidably, unsimplifiably required to make a black hole (to reproduce) is for mass/energy to collapse.

The original reproductive mechanism, therefore, must have been the direct collapse of extremely primitive and unstructured matter to form small numbers of large, crude, and therefore supermassive black holes. Far more massive, and therefore far less numerous, than the forty quintillion stellar-collapse black holes we already have so far in our specific universe. (That’s unavoidable, because the more massive a black hole is, the larger the percentage of its universe it must take up, and therefore the less of them there can be.) Evolution will thus blindly drive towards the ever-more efficient production of ever-smaller black holes - with each still able to produce a full-sized universe, thanks to the fact that the positive mass energy and negative gravitational energy in a universe net out to zero, and so full-sized universes can be built for free.

But we have discovered, in the three decades since Lee Smolin published the first, wonderful, tentative (and tragically overlooked) version of Cosmological Natural Selection, that our specific universe in fact contains roughly a trillion supermassive black holes – one at the centre of every galaxy. (It sounds like a lot, but divide that trillion into forty quintillion: there’s just one supermassive black hole for every forty million stellar collapse black holes to date.) However, though relatively few in number, those supermassive black holes are often millions or even billions of times more massive than the average stellar-collapse black hole. They must, therefore, have formed by that original reproductive mechanism; direct collapse of extremely large amounts of primitive and unstructured matter.

Why? Because evolution is frugal; she doesn’t bother to come up with a much more complicated way of doing something for which she has already come up with a perfectly good mechanism, unless that innovation leads to far greater reproductive success. Yes, evolution – blindly exploring the possibility space for the basic parameters of matter, through generation after generation of universe – eventually came up with more complex forms of matter, and thus stars, and stellar-collapse black holes, and conserved that breakthrough, because they were a huge improvement on a small number of immense direct-collapse supermassive black holes. With stars, you could get millions or even billions of stellar-collapse black holes / offspring / child universes, out of the same mass that once (in earlier generations) produced just a single supermassive black hole, and thus a single child universe.

Yet supermassive black holes clearly still have a function in our universe, given that there’s one at the center of every galaxy; given that they have been conserved by evolution. (And I explore that function in my first Blowtorch Theory post.) They are clearly still required, to help build out the larger, later, more complex structures (just as, say, complex contemporary multicellular organisms still require the presence of the primitive, ancient mitochondria they long ago engulfed, in order to build and assemble themselves). If supermassive black holes have been conserved by evolution, then their formation mechanism, direct collapse, must also have been conserved. (Similarly, mitochondria still reproduce by splitting themselves in two, as they always did – in a cycle that is not synchronised with the reproduction of their host cell.)

Meanwhile, how did mainstream cosmology think supermassive black holes formed, before the James Webb Space Telescope data? Well, they had half a dozen theories, which means they had no theory. This is the understandable and inevitable consequence of having no meta-theory; no helpful and constraining framework (such as evolution) capable of extracting meaning from data, and imposing meaning (or, if you prefer, discipline) on hypotheses. Such a meta-theory gives you something against which the real-world likelihood of hypotheses could be tested. In the absence of such a meta-theory, the only test cosmologists could apply to their ideas was (and is), are they mathematically possible (that is, without mathematical contradictions). But there are countless mathematically possible formation mechanisms, especially when dark matter is added as an optional, and tuneable, ingredient.

(ANOTHER BRIEF ASIDE: Quantum mechanics, incidentally, is in a similar pickle, which is why theoretical physicists, over the past century, have come up with SO MANY utterly wild, purely mathematical theories, attempting to advance the field, without ever actually getting anywhere. As Adam Forrest Kay puts it, in his superb book Escape from Shadow Physics,

“…without pictures of hidden reality, the only guidance is mathematical rigor. This makes the search space explode, because then all steps that do not lead immediately to contradiction are on equal footing.”

–Adam Forrest Kay, Escape From Shadow Physics: Quantum Theory, Quantum Reality and the Next Scientific Revolution

But that’s a whole other story… END OF ANOTHER BRIEF ASIDE.)

And so, in the decades before the James Webb, mainstream cosmology kept coming up with exciting new hypotheses for supermassive black hole formation.

DARK MATTER MINI-HALOS GENERATE POPULATION III STARS!

The most widely accepted theory was that the seeds for supermassive black holes were formed by “Population III” stars, the annoying term for the very first stars, made of only hydrogen and helium, which were believed to be unusually massive and shortlived: after one burned out and collapsed to form a large black hole (of maybe a hundred solar masses), it would continue to swallow a huge amount of gas and grow fast. And maybe merge with other Population III black holes, if that was still necessary to get the mass right (i.e., to keep the maths from becoming contradictory). As nobody had ever seen a Population III star, or knew when they first formed (or, indeed, IF they formed), you had a lot of mathematical wriggle room with this one. Plus, oh yes, you needed a dark matter mini-halo to form them. More mathematically wiggly fun.

DENSE STAR CLUSTER MERGER MANIA!

Another popular idea was that, in dense clusters of stars, many massive stars would sink to the center, collide, and merge to build an extremely massive star that would quickly collapse to form a black hole with a mass of between a thousand and a hundred thousand solar masses. (That’s an IMBH [Intermediate Mass Black Hole], with a mass of 10³–10⁵ M☉, if you speak maths and acronym.) Several of those intermediate mass black holes would then merge, and also accrete more gas, to finally form a supermassive black hole.

PRIMORDIAL BLACK HOLES FORM IN THE FIRST SECOND!

Another option was primordial black holes: black holes which might form in the absurdly early universe, like, the first second after the Big Bang.

(A BRIEF ASIDE FOR THE MATHS BROS, SKIP IF YOU HATE MATHS: “The first second” is, in fact, surprisingly, a fairly precise term here. When radiation dominates – i.e. in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang – the horizon mass scales ≈ 10⁵ M☉ × (t/1 s). Primordial black holes forming at t ≈ 1 s naturally sit at ~10⁵ M☉, which would make a nice, heavy seed for rapid growth into a supermassive black hole. (Earlier times make for much smaller primordial black holes; e.g., t ≈ 10⁻⁵ s → ~1 M☉.) END OF BRIEF ASIDE FOR THE MATHS BROS.)

How did these primordial black holes theoretically form? Through mechanisms for which we had no evidence, but which – given how little we know about the Big Bang itself, and how much you are therefore free to make up – you could easily make mathematically non-contradictory. Formed that early, they had a looooong time to drink gas and grow large. Also, they could merge, why not.

SELF-INTERACTING DARK MATTER GRAVOTHERMALLY COLLAPSES!

Want more? Self-interacting dark matter could undergo “gravothermal collapse” (don’t ask). I mean, it’s self-interacting dark matter! It can do anything it likes. Mathematically speaking, it could probably bake you cookies and bring them to you in bed. So, gravothermal collapse, why not.

MIGRATION-TRAP PHYSICS!

Or how about migration-trap physics – an idea borrowed from the theories used to explain how planets form in protoplanetary discs. The idea was that many small stellar-collapse black holes would get embedded in gas, which would drag them closer, pair them up, merge them, merge that merged pair with other merged pairs… and eventually you end up with a supermassive black hole.

You will note that many of these approaches to supermassive black hole formation put forward the same kind of passive, bottom-up, hierarchical, merger-driven process that was assumed for galaxy formation. This reveals the unspoken meta-theory under which cosmology was operating: it’s all arbitrary and random and means nothing. Any large complex, organised structure is staggered into, almost accidentally, through a random walk, by matter with arbitrary characteristics.

DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION HEATS THE FIRST PROTOSTARS!

Oh, but we are not finished. How about dark-star seeds! The big idea here was that dark-matter annihilation (don’t ask) would heat up the first protostars. As we know nothing at all about dark matter, you had plenty of room to make this mathematically non-contradictory.

Was there a clear winner from all this? No.

In fact, by the 2020s, you had comprehensive reviews like Inayoshi, Visbal & Haiman’s The Assembly of the First Massive Black Holes, in 2020, arguing for a multichannel model, where you had seeds forming from Population III stars, clusters smashing lots of stellar collapse black holes together, some primordial black holes, and maybe a few dark-matter-driven dark stars.

In other words, no theory. (Because, no meta-theory. No frame. Or rather, a nihilistic, meaning-denying meta-theory that couldn’t help you decide between options.)

But here’s something that makes the whole situation even more interesting, and revealing; in the years since Smolin’s original paper, Did the Universe Evolve?, some gutsy astronomers and astrophysicists – Martin Rees, Avi Loeb, Priya Natarajan, Volker Bromm, Marta Volonteri, and others – did work out that the formation of supermassive black holes by direct collapse was technically possible in our universe. They published lots of papers saying so, like this one, and this one, and this one…

However, those intrigued by direct collapse were outnumbered by those proposing all the formation mechanisms laid out above.

So direct collapse was lying there, on the table, as an option, since the 1990s. Why wasn’t it embraced?

Because cosmologists were stuck inside the old paradigm, the old meta-theory, the old frame-story: that our universe is a random one-off, with arbitrary properties, self-assembling slowly and passively and basically randomly – and certainly not fine-tuned by evolution for reproductive success through black hole production. Their meta-theory, their frame-story, therefore pushed them towards bad ideas, and away from good ones.

Three-stage cosmological natural selection, however (the key theory in the field I am starting to call Evolutionary Cosmology more generally) – provides a framework that allows you to simply and cleanly pick the killer formation mechanism – direct collapse – out of the police lineup (or identification parade, if you are in the UK or Ireland) of formation mechanism suspects.

That’s because if supermassive black holes – the earliest and most primitive structures, through which the earliest universes reproduced – are still to be found in our universe, then their production in our universe should precede that of any complex structures that evolved far later. The simple, original, reproductive mechanism shouldn’t depend on – and certainly couldn’t emerge from – later, more complex structures. That’s simply the unavoidable logic of an evolutionary history. And so, direct-collapse supermassive black holes, which must have been the earliest form of reproduction for the most primitive universes, with no structures required for reproduction, will come into existence in our specific universe before any complex structures. They will not be generated by more complex structures, and they are highly unlikely to be dependent on any more complex structures that only emerged later in the evolutionary history of universes. That’s just an unavoidable piece of evolutionary logic.

(Yes, it is possible that evolution has enriched and complexified the original mechanism of reproduction so thoroughly that it is now dependent on structures that evolved later. But the fact that there is an original mechanism of reproduction, and it is simple direct collapse, moves the odds firmly against that.)

This lets you dismiss all those formation mechanisms which rely on (early) star formation to drive (later) supermassive black hole formation. It simply cannot happen in that order. Likewise, no bottom-up, multistep, hierarchical merger model can work to explain supermassive black holes. The big primary thing can’t be built out of little secondary things. (Once formed, a supermassive black hole can later be fed stars and elephants and iPhones, sure. But it can’t be initially formed by them.)

Similarly, primordial black holes (the only other formation mechanism to make it through that filter) fails, because it requires a whole bunch of complicated (fine-tuned) tweaks to the conditions surrounding the Big Bang in order to work. And such fine-tuned tweaks can’t have PRECEDED the earliest reproduction of universes (as would be required if they ENABLE that reproduction); such fine-tuning could only be the result of later evolutionary pressure. Meanwhile, a simple, smooth Big Bang doesn’t give you – can’t give you – primordial black holes. So, that mechanism, too, fails the Evolutionary Cosmology test.

DO YOU SEE THE POWER OF THIS?

Right now, in cosmology, we don’t have a way to discriminate between mathematically plausible theories. But three-stage cosmological natural selection (and indeed the entire nascent field of Evolutionary Cosmology) gives you a way to discriminate between mathematically plausible theories, because you can do a second check – after “is it mathematically plausible?” – which is, “is it evolutionarily plausible?”; or, more precisely, “is it compatible with the evolutionary history of our universe, given that our universe reproduces in this fashion?”

This is how, back in 2022, I was able to out-predict the entire field of cosmology. Not because I’m cleverer, or more hardworking, or have any particular virtues as a scientist or thinker. But simply because I was working with, I was extending, a better meta-theory. A better framework.

It’s very, very telling that the first use of this principle, when predicting what the James Webb would see, gave such a strong positive result.

And so I think the keystone prediction of Cosmological Natural Selection, when applied to our specific universe and its development, is this: supermassive black holes should be presumed to form first, from smooth gas, by direct collapse, before galaxy formation. They should not be presumed to depend for their formation on any more complex structures, such as stars, or galaxies, which – doing far more complex things, with far more complex matter – must have evolved later in the evolutionary history of universes.

And the supermassive black holes found in our specific universe today therefore are most likely to have formed when conditions in our specific universe most resembled those found in the earliest, most primitive universes; just after the Big Bang, and before star and galaxy formation; so, well inside the first couple of hundred million years. Back when the gas was still smooth enough for direct collapses of large areas, without small local density fluctuations, and thus without breaking up into stars.

This insight, this prediction, emerges purely from evolutionary logic, not from mathematical reasoning or from physics. (Though, of course, it obeys all physical laws, and requires no new particles or physics. It’s a surprisingly conservative theory, simply applying Darwin to universes.) It was first made before the James Webb Space Telescope had sent back any data. And it appears to describe, remarkably accurately, what the James Webb is seeing in the early universe. See, for example, this astonishing paper from last year, describing a huge population of extremely early galaxies, or protogalaxies, dominated by their central supermassive black holes:

“Little Red Dots: An Abundant Population of Faint Active Galactic Nuclei at z ∼ 5 Revealed by the EIGER and FRESCO JWST Surveys”, by Matthee, Naidu, et al, 2024.

Or this great paper on UHZ1, the supermassive black hole that weighs as much as all the stars in its galaxy put together:

First Detection of an Over-Massive Black Hole Galaxy UHZ1: Evidence for Heavy Black Hole Seed Formation from Direct Collapse, by Priya Natarajan (hurray! take that victory lap!), Fabio Pacucci, et al, 2023.

Or this paper on an even larger, sleepy, early, supermassive black hole:

A dormant overmassive black hole in the early Universe, by Ignas Juodžbalis, Roberto Maiolino, William M. Baker et al, 2024.

And so on, and on.

WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME TEAM

Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection gives a wider conceptual framework for the pioneering work done on direct collapse black holes over the years by a handful of brave cosmologists and astronomers, and it explains why their colleagues turned out to be wrong to think of direct collapse as just one possible formation channel among many (with various ways of merging stellar collapse black holes as the leading candidates): direct collapse will not turn out to be a rare, unlikely event (even though Wikipedia still says “Direct collapse black holes are generally thought to be extremely rare objects in the high-redshift Universe”); direct collapse will turn out to be ubiquitous, because evolution has fine-tuned our universe to enable it.

The two approaches, those of the pioneers of direct collapse and mine, turn out to be totally complementary. We can only help each other. This is a delightful win/win situation, where the new paradigm doesn’t need to smash the old paradigm; it can just help the old paradigm solve all its problems. Reframe, and explain. We get to keep all the old data, gathered under the old paradigm; we will just understand it better now.

Let’s end with last month’s article in Quanta, scrambling to explain a recently discovered “naked” supermassive black hole, in the early universe, that doesn’t seem to have a galaxy around it yet.

“This new black hole, which is as heavy as 50 million suns and is dubbed QSO1, clashes with the old, provisional account of the galaxy formation process, which did not start with black holes. Black holes were thought to have come along only after a galaxy’s stars gravitationally collapsed into black holes that then merged and grew. But Maiolino and his colleagues described a solitary leviathan with no parent galaxy in sight.
The question now is how this black hole came to exist.”

–Quanta Magazine, “A Single, ‘Naked’ Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe”, by Charlie Wood, September 12th 2025.

Obviously, I think I know the answer. (Having predicted exactly what they are seeing now back in 2022.)

It is amusing to see that, three years into the new James Webb Space Telescope era – after three years of discovering ever-greater domination of galaxy formation by ever-larger, ever-earlier supermassive black holes – so many cosmologists, astronomers, and science journalists remain oblivious to the fact that there is a perfectly respectable and conservative theory that predicted all this...

OK, that was fun. Glad I finally got this piece written.

Now, ponder it. Stress-test the logic. See if you think it’s true. And if it is, internalise it.

Then go read Blowtorch Theory, if you haven’t already, for more – much much more – information on this evolutionary approach. Or watch this video, if video is your thing.

And I’ll go back to writing my epic spiral galaxy formation piece. (If you’re not already a subscriber to The Egg and the Rock, and you’d like to read that piece as soon as it’s done, just type in your email and hit subscribe below – it’s free – and I’ll zap it to you as soon as it is posted.)

And please do pass this on to any friends you think might be interested. These ideas need to be disseminated, discussed, and tested out in the world.

Also, as ever, if any philanthropists out there want to help fund this research; get in touch. I’ve set up an Evolutionary Cosmology Independent Research Fellowship, which is now funded by generous donors, but I’d like to set up an additional Evolutionary Cosmology Working Group, which would run interdisciplinary workshops, develop research approaches, write white papers, and generally, over time, generate the scholars this new field desperately needs, versed equally in both evolution and cosmology. The sums required to fund such initiatives are remarkably small. Hard to think of a more cost-effective way to utterly transform how we think about the universe, and our relationship to it.

And, obviously, if you are a scientist in any of these fields, and are intrigued, and would like to get involved, talk to me.

Talk to you all again here, soon.

I’m the Irish author Julian Gough; in my reckless youth, I recorded four albums, and had a hit single, with the literary indie-pop band Toasted Heretic; I’ve since written four novels, including the near-future science fiction thriller Connect, and six children’s books, including the multiply-award-winning Rabbit’s Bad Habits. The books are published in 37 languages. I also write more esoteric and respectable things, like the Coda to the Routledge Companion to Death and Literature, and more popular and less respectable things, like the ending to the best-selling computer game of all time, Minecraft – a narrative called the End Poem, which I later put into the public domain, and yes there is quite a saga behind that. For the past decade I have been working away quietly researching a non-fiction book about the universe, The Egg and the Rock. This has involved a lot of conversations with scientists across multiple fields, and a lot of frantic studying of their various subjects, to keep up with them. Three years ago, with some financial support from the Irish Arts Council, I started writing it less quietly, online, in public, here. And recently, having made some startlingly successful predictions about the early universe, I received further funding for this project from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures philanthropic fund, and Jim O’Shaughnessy’s O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Which brings us up to date… Now read on.

ACTION

I posted The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe on March 19th, and haven't posted since. Blowtorch Theory is my longest post here, and my best. The gap since is the longest gap here without a post. That's not coincidental. (If you haven’t read Blowtorch Theory yet, go read it now; this post will then make a lot more sense to you.)

REACTION

Publishing Blowtorch Theory kicked off an extraordinary sequence of reactions (most of them extremely positive), which I have been dealing with ever since. Astronomers got in touch. Potential funders got in touch. Media got in touch. I don't want to exaggerate: the weight of gold bars I have been gifted by new admirers of the theory is not going to collapse the floor of my flat and tumble us all into the cellar, and I’m not pulling down my blinds to keep out the paparazzi. It's perfectly manageable. But it's A LOT more attention than the theory had been getting before I put up the post.

EXAMPLES

Some examples, to make this more vivid: The Irish Times ran a splendidly positive piece on the theory, with quotes from a cosmologist, a biologist and a philosopher who all feel there's something worth exploring here. Here’s a quote…

Johannes Jaeger, an evolutionary biologist, systems thinker and philosopher based at the University of Vienna, said Gough’s James Webb predictions “should stand as evidence that he is certainly no crackpot”.

He accepted that while “evolutionary cosmology may be speculative at this point” it could “contain the kind of explanation that could tell us why the parameters of the universe are fine tuned the way they are. At least, it seems to me, somebody in the physics community should be open to having a look at this theory”, and while Gough’s ideas “are no doubt speculative [they] are definitely worthy of checking out. Isn’t this how science was meant to work?”

–Irish Times, April 24th 2025, Beyond the big bang: Irishman’s universal evolution theory challenges accepted cosmology

“No crackpot”! Can there be higher praise for an independent researcher?

My dense, 16,000 word post also, through social and technological dynamics I don't really understand, ended up at number one on Hacker News, the venerable bare-bones Silicon Valley website where tech types share news, then argue over it.

Hacker News can be a pretty savage place to have your ideas discussed (it’s basically a place where thousands of highly intelligent but – let’s put this delicately – socially awkward young men voluntarily take part in often brutal status competition, using ideas as weapons) so I was pleasantly surprised by how seriously these ideas were taken there, and by how positive and engaged the response was.

I'm not saying this is 100% definitely the truth and everyone should abandon CDM and string theory. I just think it's a compelling idea that deserves to be considered and discussed honestly, or perhaps even earnestly.
–An alarmingly reasonable commenter on Hacker News. Truly a sign that we are in the End Times.

Conversations with the astronomers who got in touch, and with funders likewise, are ongoing. (I will tell you more about all that later; I don’t want to jinx things right now by talking too soon.) But it was a thrill to discover that there are astronomers that I admire, whose papers I've quoted, who are now taking these ideas seriously. And it was startling to discover that some pretty influential and interesting people from other fields too (tech, philanthropy), had been quietly following me here for some time, and now wanted to get involved, help financially, etc. This has all done wonders for my faith in humanity. Good ideas do get noticed, eventually! People are in fact nice, and helpful!

NAVIGATING THE AFTERMATH

But dealing with all this stuff is not the only reason I haven't posted. Writing Blowtorch Theory was simply all-consuming, for months. There was a staggering amount of research, and writing, and rewriting, required to finalise those 16,000 words. (Plus all the work involved in asking for, and receiving, and responding to, and incorporating, feedback and critique from over a dozen wonderful beta-readers from assorted fields.) So I was pretty fried after putting it up, and I needed a little recovery time. Additionally, I’d neglected my wonderful wife Solana for those months, and I really hadn't spent enough time with my son. (They had both been very understanding and supportive, and tell me they had a great time together while I was racking up hours in the office – almost certainly better than if I’d been hanging around the playground brooding about the universe – but I felt bad about it anyway.) So I needed to get my life back into balance.

But there's another factor behind the long silence. Blowtorch Theory contained so many exciting new ideas, and covered so much territory, that anything else I found myself writing in the aftermath just seemed unimportant and inadequate in comparison. So I started several posts but didn't finish them.

That is not a long-term viable situation! Trying to come up to that standard every time is absurd: I might never write anything as exciting and original as that post again. So if this Substack is to continue, I need to get back to the intention with which I began it, which was just to show you the process behind the writing of a book. To show you stuff that isn't quite finished – but is fresher, or more revealing, perhaps, as a result of that – and get feedback, to make the book better.

I am aware that some of you are busy people, just here for the big, ambitious, finished posts; whereas others are here for the whole experience – the rough edges and behind-the-scenes glimpses, the notes and drafts and sick notes and stuff about my dad and casual emails and all. And those two audiences are, unavoidably and properly, in some tension. For the next while, I’m going to try to please both (always dangerous!) by upping my cadence of publication (which should please those who want more insight into the process – the thinking aloud – and are happy if it's not all as polished as Blowtorch Theory), while clearly labeling the importance of each post, so that those interested only in the fully articulated highlights of the theory can skip the non-core stuff. So: no need to unsubscribe; just don’t read the ones that clearly aren’t for you.

And, as ever, I want to express my appreciation to all of you, paid and unpaid subscribers alike. It is delightful to have so many companions on this journey.

A LONGER UPDATE BY ZOOM

I will email two Zoom invites at some point in the next week or so, one to all subscribers (both free and paid) and a second to paid subscribers only, inviting you to an informal Zoom call, where I can update you more personally, and at greater length, and far less discreetly, than in this brief public-facing post. I can also answer your questions on the call. (Paid subscribers can attend either or both; the only difference is that, with the smaller numbers on the paid subscriber call, there’s more opportunity for us to talk directly to each other.)

AN IMPASSIONED CALL TO ACTION! (WELL… MORE ACCURATELY… TO SIT DOWN AND DO SOME READING)

And now… if you haven’t read Blowtorch Theory yet, or you started it a couple of months ago and didn’t finish it…. Can I urge you to read it, in full? Yes, all 16,000 words. If you are interested in my writing and my ideas (and I assume you are, at least a little bit, given that you have read this far), then this is the big one. I think it’s the breakthrough post that this Substack has been groping towards for three years. It’s the post where the theory I have been exploring (three-stage cosmological natural selection, building on Lee Smolin’s original theory) explodes upward and outward in explanatory power. It might, as you begin it, seem a little dry, a little technical, a little removed from the core concerns of your life; but I don’t think it is. It paints a picture of a highly evolved and fine-tuned universe that starts a process of dynamic self-assembly almost immediately after the Big Bang. Energy is controlled and directed through simple, powerful, early processes, as sustained relativistic jets in the dense, compact early universe carve out the body plan of voids and filaments that, vastly expanded by the later expansion of the universe, we see all around us today. Those filaments form the reservoirs, and circulatory system, that ensure the longterm flow of fresh hydrogen that spiral galaxies require for multiple rounds of star formation over many billions of years. Those multiple rounds of star formation allow the steady building out (by fusion in stars) and distribution (by supernovae explosions) of the full suite of elements in the periodic table. That full suite of elements allows for the eventual production of planets, moons, and ultimately life and technology, on countless worlds as weird and wonderful as our own, around those third- and fourth-round stars; stars which could not form, were it not for the hydrogen stored for billions of years, and then delivered when needed, by the filaments – and enriched on arrival by the supernovae.

Note that, at all points, just as in a biological organism with its metabolic pathways, the energy that moves through the system organizes the system. The movement of gas is not random, and the structures produced are not arbitrary. Just as in a biological organism, in embryogenesis, the body plan and circulatory system are laid down as early as possible (and then, later, expand and grow), because that is the necessary (and of course most efficient) time to do that. Just as a biological organism maintains its vital organs while replacing the individual cells, important structures in our universe (such as spiral galaxies) build, maintain, and repair themselves over time (replacing all the stars while maintaining the structure).

And of course, the universe assembles itself into many, many discrete membrane-bound structures, at all scales: galaxies; stars, and planets, and moons; biospheres; animals, and plants; aircraft, and skyscrapers, and whatever device you are reading this on. Dynamic, homeostatic, out-of-equilibrium systems that maintain themselves over time, like the discrete, membrane-bound cells of a body, forming the discrete, membrane-bound organs of that body – forming, in total, that discrete, membrane-bound body itself…

It’s a remarkably odd thing for a universe to do; build all these discrete, nested, membrane-bound structures. (If this is an arbitrary universe with random characteristics, why doesn’t it just collapse into one big ball of sludge? Or disintegrate into countless atomic fragments? Give arbitrary values to the basic parameters of matter, and you will almost always get one or the other of those results.) Discrete, nested, orderly, structured, membrane-bound parts? Hmmmm. That’s the sort of thing evolved organisms develop…

And so Blowtorch Theory puts all these parts back together, and shows you how they work, and why. It’s systems cosmology, or if you prefer process cosmology – analogous to the systems biology developed over the past few decades by wonderful interdisciplinary biologists like Leroy Hood, Denis Noble, and Stuart Kauffman, or the splendid (and slightly more philosophical) process biology of John Dupré, Alan Love and Daniel Nicholson (building on the work of earlier thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, just as I am building on the work of physicists like John Wheeler and Lee Smolin). You could call this new field Evolutionary Cosmology. It’s a coherent description of our universe as a self-assembling system of systems; as an evolved organism traveling along a developmental path, with intelligent life, and the products of intelligent life, as part of that developmental process. To quote myself in meme form:

It’s a fundamental break with the passive, arbitrary, random, meaningless, going-nowhere universe pictured by our current mainstream cosmological models.

And, crucially, this new approach has already made far better predictions about the early universe than the mainstream did. And it now makes a bunch more predictions, which we can go look for. (Astronomers, get in touch! We have important work to do!)

Once you see the universe this way, you can’t unsee it. And you won’t want to. It’s not just a better theory, with considerably better predictive and explanatory power than the old one; it also provides a far more satisfying vision of this impossibly peculiar universe and our place in it. This theory improves the quality of your life. Goodbye to being an arbitrary accident at the edge of clouds of meaningless gas drifting in a random void; hello to being the growing, conscious tip of a living, developing, universe; the point where it comes to know itself, and act.

So, go read (or re-read, if it bewildered you slightly the first time) the full account: The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe. There is nothing more important you could be doing right now. (OK, OK, except maybe playing with your kids. But they won’t miss you for an hour…)

See you back here soon.

Gough, Julian. “The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe.” The Egg and the Rock, March 19, 2025. https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-model.

DOI to follow.

THE PROBLEM

We have known since the 1970s that our universe has a complex structure. Dense nodes, packed with galaxies and gas, are connected by long, thin, filaments of galaxies and gas, all surrounded by largely empty voids. This structure resembles the neural network in a brain, and is known as the Cosmic Web. Its extraordinary scale and complexity was not predicted in advance of observation, and came as a huge surprise. So, how did all this unexpected structure form?

THE CURRENT, PASSIVE, ANSWER

The current mainstream answer to that question is called Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM ), and it is entirely passive. Based on gravity gradually pulling everything into shape, it requires huge quantities of (unfortunately, to date, entirely theoretical) “dark matter” to work. (Plus a lot of “dark energy” – that’s the lambda bit.) Despite decades of refinement, Lambda Cold Dark Matter still can’t coherently explain all the relevant observed phenomena without making some alarmingly ad hoc, post-observation adjustments. (See the Cusp/Core problem; See the Missing Satellites problem; etc.)

Crucially, it also predicts bottom-up structure formation, with mature galaxies assumed to form gradually, and hierarchically – that is, through a long, slow, random process of repeated gravitational mergers between much smaller, messier, and unstructured clumps of stars. This means it utterly failed to predict the rapid, early, efficient formation of huge numbers of large, bright, massive, startlingly mature galaxies revealed by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope over the last two and a half years. Whether dark matter actually exists or not, it clearly isn't sufficient by itself to explain what we observe.

A new theory of structure formation is therefore required.

AN ALTERNATIVE, ACTIVE, ANSWER

In this post, I will lay out, for the first time in one place, a new, active, alternative model: the Blowtorch Theory of structure formation. It argues that large numbers of extremely early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets actively shaped the universe's structure in its first few hundred million years, largely through electromagnetic processes. These jets form vast, low-pressure cavities in the dense gas of the compact early universe, and lay down magnetic field lines, that – expanded by the universe’s growth, and shaped by later gravitational and kinetic events – go on to form the voids and filaments of the Cosmic Web we see today.

A MORE FRUGAL ANSWER

Importantly, this entire process of active structure formation by jets (assisted by gravity from ordinary matter) can be fully described without any need for dark matter. No new particles, and no new physics, are required.

SUPPORTIVE EVIDENCE

Recent evidence of unexpectedly large and early supermassive black holes (such as UHZ1 – which is as massive as all the stars in its galaxy put together), unexpectedly large and early jets (such as Porphyrion – which is a couple of hundred times longer than our Milky Way galaxy is wide, and indeed 40% longer than theory said was possible) – and, above all, large-scale extremely early rapid galaxy formation around active supermassive black holes, gives a great deal of support to this new theory.

(And even as this Blowtorch Theory post was being researched and written, a paper was published detailing an extraordinary blazar – a jet, a blowtorch, pointed straight at the earth from over 13 billion years ago, just 750 million years after the Big Bang – far earlier than Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted, but slap-bang where the theory outlined here said we would find them. See: A blazar in the epoch of reionization, by Eduardo Bañados et al, Nature, December 17, 2024.)

The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.

Blowtorch theory works, and can be explored, independently of its parent theory: however, three-stage cosmological natural selection gives an important and useful framework for more deeply understanding blowtorch theory and its implications.

But let’s start by laying out in more detail the problem our new theory solves.

INTO THE VOID

“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

THE PROBLEM, IN MORE DETAIL

Cosmic voids are vast regions in our universe containing almost no stars, galaxies, or gas.

They’re not vague, blurry, density fluctuations, either. These voids are sharply bounded, with densities about an order of magnitude lower than their surroundings. In the main body, density is less than 10% of the universe’s average (often much less); near the edge, it rises to 20%, and then sharply to 100% at the walls.

We didn’t predict their existence.

We only discovered them in 1978. (Hats off to Gregory and Thompson, and, independently, Jõeveer, Einasto and Tago.)

And we were startled to discover they take up more than 80% of the universe’s volume, while containing only a tiny fraction of its matter.

3D MAPS

In the late 1970s, large-scale redshift measurements of galaxies – tracking how far their visible light shifted into the red as they moved away from us – allowed us to map the universe with depth for the first time. Before this, our maps were essentially 2D, like a sheet of paper, with near and far objects overlapping; we had no way of knowing if a vast empty space separated them.

But with these new 3D maps, we discovered that over 90% of all stars, galaxies, and gas are crammed into just 20% of the universe. In fact, the majority of stars and galaxies by mass are packed into the dense regions we call clusters and superclusters, which occupy less than 1% of the universe’s volume. These clusters form dense nodes, connected by filaments along which gas appears to travel in massive flows.

The result is a dynamic network that resembles a brain’s neurons, or a city’s transport network, far more than it does random clouds of gas.

If you have trouble with cosmological visualisation (some don’t, some do), just imagine the universe as a country, and galaxies as buildings, ranging in size from huts to gigafactories: nearly all the buildings, especially the largest, are packed tightly together in isolated villages and towns (dense nodes containing clusters and superclusters), taking up only 1-2% of the land. An extensive network of roads, motorways, and canals (the filaments) connects these hubs, spreading over ten to twenty times as much land, mostly to transport gas for the star-making factories in the towns. The remaining 80% of land is almost empty. (Voids.)

These complex, network-like structures came as a huge shock to astronomers. 1981 was the year it became a crisis, when Robert Kirshner, Stephen Gregory, and Paul Schechter discovered the Boötes Void. It was 250,000,000 light years in diameter – so you could line up 2,500 copies of our own Milky Way galaxy, side by side, inside it. Such a vast space should contain thousands of galaxies – but the Boötes Void (now often known fondly as the Great Nothing) only contained roughly sixty…

This wasn’t just a failure of prediction; it was a revealing failure of observation. We had been looking at the entire universe – through a huge range of telescopes, across all frequencies, from radio to x-rays – for decades. Yet we had completely failed to see the actual structure of what we were observing.

This failure wasn’t entirely the fault of the astronomers; voids, after all, are empty, making them easy to overlook. But discovering the scale and sharpness of these voids threw into high relief a deeply revealing incorrect assumption that underlay all cosmology.

Astronomers had assumed, right up until this point, that our universe, on the larger scales, could be treated like a simple gas in equilibrium, with galaxies behaving like gas molecules, all spread out randomly. Sure, theorists like the great Belarusian physicist Yakov Zeldovich (father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb) had done some interesting work, in the early 1970s, on how matter might collapse asymmetrically under gravity – but prior to the redshift surveys of the late 1970s and early 80s, any astronomer or cosmologist would have told you that our universe couldn’t contain anything like the Böotes Void – let alone something like the Sloan Great Wall (discovered in 2003), a filament stuffed with galaxies and gas that’s 1.4 billion light-years long. From a distance, statistically, the universe was assumed to be entirely smooth, with no structure. Simple matter, obeying simple gas laws.

This incorrect assumption emerged from an even more fundamental unexamined assumption: that our universe was a one-off, with no history, in which randomly distributed matter with arbitrary characteristics blindly obeyed arbitrary laws, with random consequences.

That the first basic assumption had turned out to be utterly, eye-wateringly wrong should have led to some introspection in cosmology, astronomy, and astrophysics about the validity of the second, and even more fundamental, unexamined assumption. But it didn’t.

THE MAINSTREAM SOLUTION – LAMBDA COLD DARK MATTER – AND ITS FAILURE

Instead, they back-engineered a new theory from scratch, to fit the startling new data. Fair enough – when you’ve got something completely wrong, you need a new theory. But this “new” theory tried to fix the problem as simply as possible (since the deeper unexamined assumption was still that the development of our universe was just the simple addition of random processes), and thus relied on gravity alone. That might seem odd to you (and it should certainly seem odd to you after reading this post), given that electromagnetism is an astonishing 36 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. That means the electromagnetic force exerted by a single electron is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times stronger than the gravitational force it exerts. (Thus a modest fridge magnet, or some static from your hair, can cause an object to defy the gravitational pull of the entire Earth.) How can you leave electromagnetism out of the picture? But, in fact, this decision made total sense (given their unexamined foundational assumptions), and was entirely uncontroversial at the time.

That's because gravity is simple, and additive. Gravity can’t be blocked, reversed, or cancelled. Add more matter; it bends spacetime further; you get more gravity. That’s it, done. A large mass of matter will therefore always attract more matter gravitationally, and get bigger over time. But any large positive electromagnetic charge will attract nearby negative charges, which will immediately neutralise it. And so, in a random, chaotic, structureless environment, gravity is self-reinforcing: but electromagnetism is self-cancelling.

And so they understandably (but as we shall show, wrongly) assumed that electromagnetism couldn't have any effect at cosmic scales.

Zeldovich got back to work and, in papers like Giant Voids in the Universe (written with Einasto and Shandarin, 1982), and The Large Scale Structure of the Universe 1. General Properties. One- and Two- Dimensional Models (with Arnold and Shandarin, also 1982) found a way that gravitational collapse could give you something that approximated, roughly, to filaments and voids. Sure, the voids he got in these papers were too small, and too round (compared to what we were seeing), and there were a lot of other problems (it couldn’t really explain why galaxies were stable, and why everything didn’t just continue collapsing). But it was a promising approach, and we didn’t have any other theories. So, other cosmological theorists adopted it (Zeldovich himself died in 1987), and got to work developing it, adding an “adhesion model”, and a few other tweaks, to the original Zeldovich approximation, to try and make it work (i.e, get matter to stick together and actually produce galaxies).

There was one problem, however. When they added it all up, the matter they could see – the stars, galaxies and gas made from all the standard particles we know about, called for short “baryonic matter” – didn't have enough mass to pull everything into these extreme shapes by their gravity alone. But gravity was believed to be the only force capable of shaping anything at cosmic scales! This forced the theorists to introduce massive quantities of dark matter – imaginary particles that don’t exist in the standard model of particle physics, invented purely to patch up issues like this one (and so also the galactic rotation problem, certain gravitational lensing anomalies, some odd features of the Cosmic Microwave Background, etc.)

Since no one’s ever seen any dark matter, it can be given any properties you want. And that, regrettably but understandably, makes it extremely seductive.

Sprinkle enough of this marvellous stuff you’ve just invented precisely where you’d like it, give it the properties you most desire, and – what a wonderful surprise! – you can coax everything into the shapes we observe, using gravity alone. Kind of. If you squint. And if that doesn’t quite work, just add in Dark Energy (first proposed in 1998 - yeah, that’s the Lambda again). Or maybe Dark Flow (first proposed in 2008). Or Dark Radiation (first proposed in 2009). Or my personal favorite, Dark Fluid! (First proposed back in 2005). It has “negative mass” – yes, just like phlogiston (another imaginary substance that mainstream science once firmly believed in, for reasons which made a lot of sense at the time, but which turned out to be wrong). Whole Dark Sectors now exist: rich landscapes of imaginary quantum fields, across which wander escaped zoos of hypothetical particles, none of which have ever been observed. Dark photons! Sterile neutrinos! Axions! A new “dark” gauge group, why not, that is completely unconnected to the actual Standard Model gauge group! True, many of these later suggestions are fringe theories, with little support. But such new theories keep being proposed, because Lambda Cold Dark Matter, for all its undoubted successes (and you don’t get to be the leading mainstream theory without some big successes), keeps running into new problems, and therefore needs all the help it can get.

As you can see, with dark matter, like black tar heroin, once you’ve started, it’s hard to stop. And as time passes, you need more and more to get the same hit. After fifty years of tirelessly tweaking this wonderful, seductive, never-quite-there theory, how are we doing? Well, to drag everything into shape using only gravity now requires five times more dark matter than all the actual, observable, baryonic matter in our universe put together.

That’s the current mainstream explanation for filaments and voids. Five invisible universes worth of dark matter, with ever-changing properties that we never seem to be able to quite nail down, piled up on top of the one we can see. That – bizarrely – is considered the respectable, conservative theory.

Great. There's only one real problem: this respectable new theory is based on the same set of deep, foundational, flawed assumptions which led to the original embarrassing failure of prediction. The theory is, therefore, unfortunately, wrong.

PROBLEMS WITH ΛCDM

Does it approximate to the data? Sure, but so did Ptolemy’s earth-centred model of the universe (once you’d added enough epicycles). But there are, unfortunately, ongoing problems.

The Bullet Cluster was held up as evidence that dark matter is cold and collisionless. But the Trainwreck Cluster was held up, for a while, as evidence that dark matter is not cold, and not collisionless – that it’s warm, and self-interacting. (Warm dark matter has also been used to explain the cusp/core problem, etc.) If you keep changing the very fundamentals of what dark matter is, to suit each new, ambiguous, observation – if there is simply nothing solid there to hang onto – then you don’t have a theory.

Dark matter is basically a tiny, beautifully embroidered scientific duvet you can pull into position to cover any exposed area – but only at the price of exposing a different area.

For example, if you tweak your dark matter to suit big galaxies, it stops working for small galaxies. (The vexéd cusp/core problem.)

Meanwhile, adjust it to perfectly explain the numbers and sizes of the galaxies we see all around us today, and it massively overpredicts the number of extremely small dwarf galaxies in the early universe.

And the theory didn’t predict, and can’t explain, the recently discovered Ultra Diffuse Galaxies, DF2 and DF4 – which behave as if they contain no dark matter at all.

And now the new James Webb Space Telescope has finally shown us what's happening in the first billion years after the Big Bang… and Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted none of it.

STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE, EVERYWHERE…

The early universe turns out to be rich in structure – including huge numbers of mature galaxies when the universe was just 4 or 5% of its current age, some containing supermassive black holes as massive as all the stars in their galaxy put together. (So, not the small, messy, random clusters of stars, and slow, bottom-up galaxy formation, that ΛCDM predicted.) But don’t worry, theorists are now busy “explaining” these, after the fact, by fiddling with their numerous free parameters (some models have up to ten) – essentially adding epicycles.

This doesn’t mean dark matter doesn’t exist (though I personally believe it does not, or certainly not in the form, and quantity, ΛCDM suggests) – but that, even if it does, it’s clearly grossly inadequate, on its own, to explain structure formation in our universe. With or without dark matter, there’s something else going on.

Back here on Earth, fifty years of increasingly expensive attempts to directly detect it have turned up nothing at all. (Except, of course, more funding for bigger versions of the same failed experiments.)

If the theory keeps failing at this scale, it might not be the universe that’s wrong, it might be the theory. Perhaps we've reached a point where we should stop trying to modify the universe with more and more imaginary matter, and start looking for a new theory.

The trouble is… It’s too late. For the past twenty years, the largest and most costly computer simulations of structure formation in our universe – running from the original Millennium, Millennium II, and Millennium XXL models, right up to the more recent Uchuu and AbacusSummit simulations – only include dark matter. Yeah, actual baryonic matter – the entire visible universe – is treated as a rounding error, and left out. Thousands of published papers are based on these simulations.

Are there some simulations that include baryonic matter as well? Recently, yes, sure – EAGLE, SIMBA, IllustrisTNG, Magneticum, Horizon-AGN, FLAMINGO – but they typically cover much smaller areas, with some just modelling the formation of a single galaxy. (FLAMINGO is the exception here, in trying to model large-scale stuff too.) This is in many ways understandable: the behaviour of baryonic matter (i.e. the real world) is absurdly complex compared to that of dark matter (which is a mathematician’s dream of simplicity – hi again, Zeldovich!). It’s therefore much harder to model, and far more costly to compute, which is another reason everybody left it out until computers got fast enough to handle it.

That’s not the real problem, though. The real problem is that none of these new simulations that incorporate baryonic matter simulate it from first principles: they simply adjust a whole bunch of feedback parameters that, in the real world, we do not know (black hole feedback, star formation rates, gas dynamics), until they get a result that resembles observations. Hey, if I tune all these dials enough, the result looks like a galaxy! Cool! Are the feedback parameters chosen accurate to reality? Er, nobody knows! They are just another bunch of tuneable parameters, piled on top of the six tuneable parameters for dark matter. This is extremely expensive CGI, not science. It makes ΛCDM completely unfalsifiable.

Or, as the great Von Neumann put it,

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
–John von Neumann

Always reactive, never predictive: the dog of theory is simply chasing the car of observational data. The car turns left, the dog follows. Car turns right, dog follows. It’s a worrying sign, that the dog never knows where the car will go next.

TWO CHEERS FOR COLD DARK MATTER

However, I don’t want to be too dismissive of Lambda Cold Dark Matter as a theory. No theory gets to dominate its field without some juicy, solid wins. Back in the early 2000s, Lambda Cold Dark Matter accurately predicted the Cosmic Microwave Background power spectrum – that is, it predicted the height of the soundwaves sloshing about in the tiny, ultra-hot, ultra-dense, fluid, early universe – in the brief era before light and matter uncoupled and released seventy percent of all the photons in the universe today in a single, universe-wide flash. (That flash, redshifted by the expansion of the universe, now forms the Cosmic Microwave Background.) NASA’s WMAP (the Wilson Microwave Anisotropy Probe), and the European Space Agency’s Planck space observatory, both confirmed waves of the specific heights predicted by ΛCDM – heights that didn’t make sense with just baryonic matter, but did with a lot of dark matter (and even more dark energy). That was a BIG win; after that, Cold Dark Matter became the “standard model” of cosmology.

MORE MATTER, OR LESS GRAVITY? (COKE, OR PEPSI?)

But if I’m going to mention that success, then I should also mention the successes of the main rival theory to ΛCDM, Modified Newtonian Gravity, or MOND. If ΛCDM tries to fix all the problems in the universe with more matter, then MOND tries to fix all the problems in the universe with less gravity. MOND’s also been around since the early 1980s, but, in 2021, it finally developed a model – the Aether-Scalar-Tensor framework, or AeST – which ALSO maps perfectly onto the acoustic peaks revealed by WMAP and Planck. (It does it by proposing a new vector field and scalar field that duplicate the effects of Cold Dark Matter in the early universe – see “Aether scalar tensor theory: Linear stability on Minkowski space”, by Constantinos Skordis and Tom Złośnik, and the more recent “Aether scalar tensor theory: Hamiltonian Formalism,” by Marianthi Bataki, Constantinos Skordis, and Tom Złośnik.)

So you can get a fit to the data with an imaginary, invisible new particle; but you can also get a fit to the data with an imaginary, invisible new field. I worry that the real truth we are uncovering here is that imaginary, invisible new things, with a bunch of free parameters, can always be made to fit the data.

ΛCDM and MOND are in fact now beautifully balanced in terms of success: ΛCDM is the most empirically successful for big-picture cosmology (except recently, as we have seen, in the early universe), while MOND is the most empirically successful on small, single-galaxy scales. And both are pretty bad at what the other is good at.

But MOND arrived at a full cosmological theory second, and so – despite being just as successful (and just as unsuccessful) as ΛCDM – must play Pepsi to ΛCDM’s Coke.

And Coke, as we have seen above, now dominates the world.

The fact that we have two theories with almost identical success and failure rates – yet one is built into every model, and the other completely marginalised – is a sign that what is going on here is sociology, rather than science.

But anyway, as a result of all this, dark matter is now baked into every mainstream model, as the single explanation for everything problematic, making it impossible to fix the actual underlying problems. They can’t even see what they’re looking at.

And so a lot of brilliant people remain trapped inside a faulty paradigm.

By contrast, the model I’m exploring actually predicts shit in advance.

Feel free to check: Predictions here.

Confirmation here…

…And in more technical form here…

…And more confirmation in accessible form here…

…And in more technical form here…

…And even more confirmation in accessible form here…

…And in more technical form here…

So, is there a theory that can explain voids, filaments, and their magnetic fields, using only the matter we can observe – the particles in the Standard Model of particle physics – and the established laws of nature?

Yes.

It’s called Blowtorch Theory. No, you haven’t heard of it, because this is the first time it's been laid out in full in public like this. (Yes, as some of you know, I’ve been working on it, behind the scenes – talking to scientists, researching, getting feedback – for months; building on ten years of earlier research for a book on cosmological natural selection. The specific, original inspiration for this post/paper, however, was this terrific paper in Nature, back in September 2024, by Martijn S. S. L. Oei, Martin J. Hardcastle, Roland Timmerman, et al, on extremely large, sustained jets: Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web.) But first, an uncharacteristically modest note, giving praise where it’s due…

WOBBLING HEROICALLY ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

Blowtorch theory ultimately emerges from cosmological natural selection (as I’ll explain later), and therefore grows from the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin’s seminal ideas (which were in turn influenced by innovative work on evolutionary biology by the great Lynn Margulis and Stephen Jay Gould), as well as excellent later work by Clemént Vidal, John Smart, Louis Crane, Michael E. Price and others. Of course their work, like mine, owes a profound debt to earlier work on black holes by those titans of cosmology, John Wheeler, Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, and to breakthroughs in magnetohydrodynamics by Steven Balbus and John Hawley (plus many others). I’m also borrowing from Priya Natarajan, Volker Bromm, Avi Loeb, and Marta Volonteri’s pioneering work on direct-collapse supermassive black holes. And of course, I’m building on the legacy of countless astronomers; far too many to list here individually. (Thank you, thank you, thank you!)

So, that was the background – both the science and the sociology, because both are important if you’re to fully understand the peculiar situation we are in.

Here’s the theory.

THE BLOWTORCH THEORY OF STRUCTURE FORMATION

I’m calling it the Blowtorch Theory, because new theories need a punchy name to break into the broader conversation. (But, if you’d be more comfortable with something respectably scientific-sounding, feel free to call it the Directed Plasma Overpressure Model, or the Localized Radiative Jet Confluence Hypothesis, or some other bullshit no one will remember.)

It starts with two observations.

The first: every one of the trillion or so galaxies in our universe that’s big enough or near enough for us to observe closely, appears to have a supermassive black hole at its center, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of our sun. And they have a power-law-like distribution: a few of the bigger ones, lots of the smaller ones.

The second: the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – the light emitted by all that hot gas shortly after the Big Bang – is incredibly smooth. We know that the only density fluctuations in that gas are very subtle, less than 0.001%: we think they come from early quantum events, blown up vastly in size by inflation since the Big Bang. These density fluctuations occur at all scales, and have a power-law-like distribution: a few big ones, lots of smaller ones. Oh, and at the range of scales that would match the volumes of gas required to make the earliest, and therefore smallest, versions of all those supermassive black holes (they'll grow in size later), there are, to a very rough approximation – to within an order of magnitude – around a trillion of them.

Let's put those together.

Now, the smoothness of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation shows that the initial gas cloud in the early universe was much too smooth for easy star formation. (You need small, dense, pockets of gas in order to form stars.) This is a problem for the current, mainstream, bottom-up theories of star formation and galaxy formation, which start with the formation of scattered individual stars, somehow, from this smooth gas.

But this smoothness (with its occasional large-but-subtle, not small-and-extreme, density variations) is actually ideal for direct-collapse supermassive black hole formation. When the smooth gas cloud collapses across the entire large-but-subtle density fluctuation, there are no local, small, dense pockets that could otherwise break up into stars. It’s this smoothness which allows the entire vast field of gas to collapse directly into a single supermassive black hole.

And so blowtorch theory argues that all of these supermassive black holes must form now, inside the first hundred million years, and almost certainly within the first 50 million after the Big Bang. And they must form by direct collapse, semi-simultaneously, in a rapid, abrupt phase transition from what was, until then, an ultrasmooth cloud of gas.

AN OBJECTION CONSIDERED

A perfectly understandable mainstream objection would be that the fluctuations are far too subtle, too small – just 0.001%! – to trigger such a direct collapse of such a large area of gas. My argument, however, is that the conditions in the early universe are fine-tuned so that such fluctuations nonetheless do trigger such collapses, at a specific point in the expansion of the smooth gas.

I do understand mainstream resistance to this kind of argument-by-consequences, which can seem lacking in rigour. But please note that, similarly, in 1953, the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, using precisely this logic, predicted a highly unlikely resonance frequency in the carbon-12 atom, that would allow for the extremely efficient, complex (and unlikely) fusion mechanism of the triple-alpha process (where, deep inside a star, three helium-4 nuclei – alpha particles – are turned into carbon). He didn't predict this using mathematical logic: he predicted it because, when he looked around our universe, he saw a shit-ton of carbon everywhere, and it had to come from somewhere. Fusing three helium nuclei would do it, however unlikely that seemed. Hoyle had to urge his more cautious colleague, the nuclear astrophysicist William A. Fowler, to look for the necessary resonance. Grumbling, Fowler looked. And found it. (Amusingly, Fowler got a Nobel for this, in 1983; Fred, who had actually come up with the idea, didn’t, partly because he had annoyed too many people with some of his other, sillier ideas. Yes, I am aware that it’s a thin line between genius and just being spectacularly wrong! But walking that line is where all the fun is to be had…)

Similarly, in 1982, Dan Shechtman discovered quasicrystals with non-repeating, five-fold (or ten-fold) rotational symmetries were possible. This did not just require an unlikely level of fine-tuning: it was explicitly ruled out by the established laws of crystallography at the time. His paper was repeatedly rejected, the head of his lab told him to “go read the textbook,” then asked him to leave the research group for “bringing disgrace” on the team. When the paper was finally published, two years later, the most famous chemist in the world, Linus Pauling pissed all over him, saying, “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” But, when people finally actually looked, they discovered Shechtman was right. (He got an apologetic Nobel in 2011.) And the aperiodic, yet ordered, structures he discovered have novel mechanical, thermal, and photonic properties that classical crystals lack. Again, a highly unlikely level of fine-tuning that allowed for a complex outcome turned out to be true.

I predict it will, again, here, for reasons that will soon become clear.

PHASE TRANSITION

The ultrasmooth gas, expanding after the Big Bang, resembles a supersaturated cloud, which on a hot summer’s day can transition extremely rapidly from not-a-single-raindrop to a torrential shower, comprising millions of drops, all produced semi-simultaneously.

As the smoothness of the gas ensures nearly uniform conditions across the early universe, and as the subtle density variations are very thoroughly distributed across the universe, many regions should hit the critical threshold at the same time. In that phase transition, you should therefore see multiple, semi-simultaneous direct collapses – just like rain abruptly beginning in many spots within a saturated cloud.

It's likely that the shockwave from each of those initial direct collapses would compress nearby gas, pushing it past the collapse threshold, and thus setting off further collapses, in a cascading wave.

So you would see chain reactions in many localised regions, till they all meet – rather as, say, crystallisation spreads during the phase transition from water to ice.

WHY MUST ALL THE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES FORM EARLY?

The supermassive black holes all need to form together, now, at this early stage, from the smooth gas, because they won’t be able to later. Why? The gas will no longer be smooth enough – because these new, massive black holes are about to fuck up that smoooooooooth gas real good.

SWITCHING ON THE BLOWTORCH

Remember, each supermassive black hole starts with a mass of tens or hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, even hundreds of millions of suns, depending on the size of the fluctuation that triggered it. (The bigger ones are much less numerous. But they’ll all grow larger than this, later, as they eat more gas, and as some galaxies merge.) This intense concentration of mass begins to gravitationally attract enormous quantities of gas.

Why doesn't this gas orbit the black hole endlessly, and frictionlessly, like planets orbit stars? Because the shock of the collapse has ionized some of the surrounding gas, into positive protons and negative electrons. This ionized state makes it an electrically-charged plasma, generating electromagnetic fields and currents that cause turbulence. As the American astrophysicist Steven Balbus and his colleague John Hawley worked out in 1991, this turbulence acts as a remarkably efficient magnetic brake, transferring the plasma’s angular momentum outward, allowing the plasma itself to move rapidly inward, closer and hotter, forming a ferociously hot accretion disc – a blazing donut – locked tightly around the black hole. Some gas falls into the small mouth of the (dense, but tiny) black hole, bulking it up, but most of the gas just spirals closer for now, getting ludicrously hot from magnetic reconnection events (rather than mere particle-to-particle friction). Basically, a huge, hot, increasingly frantic queue builds up outside the exclusive, narrow, VIP entrance to the black hole.

“And the amazing thing is that even a very weak magnetic field would be enough to completely disrupt the stability properties of the gas. And that's what a lot of people had a hard time getting their head around.”

–Steven Balbus, co-discoverer of the magnetorotational instability. (Also known as the Balbus–Hawley instability.)

(Yes, yet another example of the Fred Hoyle / Dan Shechtman phenomenon. Evolved systems turn out to be extremely fine-tuned, at the level of the basic parameters of matter, so as to enable unlikely outcomes that lead to complex processes and structures…)

THE DYNAMOS POWER UP

Meanwhile, conservation of angular momentum means all the rotational energy of the initial vast, smooth cloud of gas is now concentrated into the much smaller black hole. (It’s supermassive, but it’s not big; millions of times the mass of our sun, all now crammed into a space far smaller than our solar system.)

This concentration forces the supermassive black hole to spin ridiculously rapidly, at close to its absolute maximum theoretical limit (so, pretty close to the speed of light), at the core of a hot, dense cloud of charged particles, the closest of which are now also spinning at nearly lightspeed. The whole system becomes a colossal dynamo, generating an absurdly powerful magnetic field from the rotating plasma.

This magnetic field now blasts two jets of hyper-energetic charged particles from the black hole’s poles: one north, one south. The dynamo electromagnetically accelerates these particles to almost light speed. (There goes all that shed angular momentum!) As they move this fast, you see relativistic effects – time dilates, particle masses increase relative to some guy watching from far away, all the fun stuff predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity. (Hence, “relativistic jets.”)

The jet is also collimated, meaning it stays coherent and narrow as it beams into the surrounding gas. They still can’t fully EXPLAIN how it remains so tightly collimated over such long distances; theory says Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities – turbulence, basically – should cause it to break up. But the further away in space they look (and thus the further back in time), the more the mainstream theory fails: Porphyrion, the 23-million-light-years-long jet described recently in Nature is, after all, 40% longer than theory said was possible. Yet again, fine-tuning means that highly unlikely orderly structure emerges from what a naive, everything-is-arbitrary, approach assumes should be random chaos. (Detect a theme?)

So, what does this tightly-focused, high-speed jet of charged particles do? A lot. It first sheds angular momentum from the hot gas “donut” around the black hole, stopping the donut from disintegrating and allowing more gas to fall in. But I’ll focus on the three most important later structural impacts of these jets: galaxy formation, void formation, and magnetic field formation (in galaxies, filaments, and voids).

1.) Galaxy Formation

Immediately surrounding the supermassive black hole is a hot, tight, fast-spinning donut of ionized gas. Further out lies a much larger, cooler, slower sphere of smooth gas, which has been drawn in by gravity. As it moves closer, this gas speeds up (thanks to conservation of angular momentum) and begins to flatten out into a much thinner, denser, disc. (Yeah, Zeldovich’s dear old pancake again.) The relativistic jet from the black hole blasts through this disc like a bullet through a water balloon, sending out pressure waves that disrupt the smoothness of the gas, causing pockets of density – and thus star formation. This cascade of star formation builds a tight, compact galaxy around the supermassive black hole.

I predicted this process in more detail two years ago, before the James Webb Space Telescope released its first data. (And I was right.) I won’t recap here, as I want to focus on the other two important structural consequences: void formation and magnetic fields.

2.) Void Formation

Many of these early relativistic jets just keep on going, reaching distances ten times, a hundred times, longer than the width of the galaxy forming at their base. And remember, I’m arguing that there's very roughly a trillion of these jets, in assorted sizes, nicely spaced out. As they streak through the pristine gas of the early universe at close to light speed, the jets generate massive shockwaves that push matter out of 80% of the universe.

This is not fanciful. We know that, when fed gas, supermassive black holes fire jets from both magnetic poles. We know that, over time, these jets form huge, low-pressure cavities in the gas north and south of their galaxy. We see evidence of such lobes today – like the Fermi bubbles (which we only discovered in 2010), north and south of our own Milky Way galaxy, probably caused recently by a brief firing of jets from our galaxy’s own supermassive black hole (as some gas, or a star, fell in).

We know that older cavities tend to be larger, because they formed when gas in the vicinity of the supermassive black holes was denser and more plentiful, providing the fuel for longer, more powerful jets. (For example, a marvellous 2024 paper by Francesco Ubertosi, Simona Giacintucci, Tracy Clarke et al, on galaxy cluster Abell 496, shows cavities within cavities within cavities, with the oldest being the largest.)

My prediction here is that the dense gas of the early universe feeds sustained, powerful jets, which generate vast, early cavities that continue expanding, eventually detaching from their jet source (which eventually runs out of fuel, and switches off). These cavities, formed by an electromagnetic jet, will have (I’m arguing) a weak but effective electromagnetic boundary – rather like a soap bubble’s skin – so when they encounter other cavities, their electromagnetic skins could simply merge, forming larger voids. The universe’s expansion should then hugely expand them over time.

Blowtorch theory argues that is what generated today’s voids, with their blurry balloon-animal shapes.

A trillion dynamos, switching on a trillion blowtorches, early.

In pushing gas out of 80% of the universe, these jets are building dense gas reservoirs in the remaining 20%: the narrow spaces, or filaments, between voids. Reservoirs the galaxies will draw on later, using the third thing the electromagnetic jets are building. Something they are particularly suited to…

3.) Electromagnetic Fields! (and thus Filament Formation!)

The electromagnetic jets in this high-powered, early era – jets sometimes ten, fifty, even a hundred times longer than the galaxy at their base – are also laying down an electromagnetic circulatory system. This is important: Lay down magnetic field lines early enough, and you constrain the future development of the entire universe.

MAGNETIC FIELDS CONSTRAIN AND GUIDE IONISED GAS

Here’s why. Magnetic fields constrain and guide ionized gas (plasma). Within a magnetic field, plasma can’t move freely in all directions: it moves much more easily along magnetic field lines than across them. Processes like heat conduction, viscosity, and diffusion also become highly directional in a magnetic field. So, movement, heat distribution, energy flow – everything in a magnetic field follows the path of least resistance along those field lines.

In this way, magnetic fields act like tram tracks for charged particles (or arteries, if you’d prefer a 3D analogy), organizing the energy flow, and mass flow, that structures the system.

“Anytime astronomers figure out a new way of looking for magnetic fields in ever more remote regions of the cosmos, inexplicably, they find them.”
—Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine, from The Hidden Magnetic Universe Begins to Come Into View, July 2020.

True, though I’d remove the word “inexplicably.”

EXPLAINING MAGNETIC FIELDS IN VOIDS

We recently discovered that even voids contain faint electromagnetic fields. Currently there is no generally accepted theory for how those fields got there. Blowtorch theory argues that they were left by the jets that sculpted the voids.

EXPLAINING MAGNETIC FIELDS IN FILAMENTS

The magnetic fields in the filaments connecting denser regions? Those are the electromagnetic ghosts of the original ultra-powerful, ultra-long jets. Basically, electromagnetic pipes. Their field lines link back to the centers of the galaxies that produced them, establishing a cosmic plumbing system that will, over time, drip-feed back to those galaxies the gas they previously pushed away into dense reservoirs.

EXPLAINING THE ABRUPTNESS OF THE DENSITY GRADIENTS

This also explains the abrupt tenfold change in density between filament and void. (Which is a major problem for Lambda Cold Dark Matter.) Without electromagnetic containment, gravity alone should, over time, simply blur out this abrupt density transition. Gravity drops off smoothly with distance, not abruptly, by an order of magnitude, at a specific point. Similarly, gas, even in open space, should slowly diffuse from high-pressure areas to low. Yet that, too, does not seem to be happening to the extent that a purely gravitational theory predicts. The maintenance of such hard boundaries over billions of years makes perfect sense, electromagnetically: it doesn't make any sense gravitationally (with or without dark matter).

However, I don’t want to give you the impression this whole process is ultra-efficient, with totally clearcut boundaries. The formation of galaxies, voids, and filaments is messy (as processes evolved through blind Darwinian evolution tend to be); galaxies crash into each other, some gas gets stranded, filaments combine, and tangle. It’s more like Darwin’s entangled bank than a smoothly operating machine.

But that’s fine, because, from evolution’s point of view (and I'll expand on this shortly), the important thing is to get the gas moving now, and to lay down magnetic field lines that can capture it and direct that movement. Galaxies are hurriedly laying cable, laying pipes, building reservoirs and filling them, while everything is still close together; while it is still easy. (Just as an embryo grows its arteries and veins while still in utero.)

Once in place, these magnetic field lines essentially “freeze” into the plasma. As the universe expands, the field lines thus stretch and expand along with the plasma itself (albeit weakening due to flux conservation).

SOPHISTICATED, POWERFUL, EARLY, ELECTROMAGNETIC STRUCTURE FORMATION

The key point: Early structure formation in our universe is primarily electromagnetic, not gravitational. Gravity does the grunt work of pulling (particularly pulling together the clusters and superclusters), but electromagnetism does the sophisticated work of shaping and directing.

And, note, this model needs only baryonic matter – the stuff we can see. No dark matter required. (You can leave it in the picture if you wish, but why? It isn’t necessary.)

There will be a couple of obvious questions, so let me answer them here.

Q: But the voids we see today are up to a hundred million light-years wide, or even larger! And the jets we see today are far smaller than that, peaking at a few million light-years in length! So how can such small jets make such large voids?

A: Because those voids were made early, when the universe was still extremely dense and compact. At redshift 20 – roughly 180 million years after the Big Bang – our universe was 20 times smaller in diameter than it is now, with gas therefore nearly 9,300 times denser. (The average density of matter in the universe scales as the cube of the inverse of the scale factor – or, less technically, if you shrink the universe in all three dimensions, you squeeze the living fuck out of the matter.)

By redshift 10 – or 500 million years after the Big Bang – the universe was still 10 times smaller, and gas was 1,300 times denser than today. So those early jets didn’t need to travel vast distances to have massive effects. Jets were pushing between a thousand and ten thousand times as much gas out of the way as they would over a similar distance today. And, over time, the universe’s expansion would make these early voids ten or twenty times longer, and wider, and taller – and thus thousands of times larger in volume – than they were at redshift 10 or 20… but they began relatively compact.

Moreover, there was much more, and much denser, gas in close proximity to supermassive black holes in the early universe. Enough available gas to feed their dynamos, and thus sustain long, powerful jets, over extended periods – tens or even hundreds of millions of years; far longer than what we see today in our vastly expanded, far more diffuse cosmos.

As in most evolved systems, key structures form remarkably early, while it’s still easy. A human embryo, for example, has decided which end will eventually be head, and which feet, by day five, when it’s a mere 64-cell blob, less than 0.2 millimetres in diameter. Likewise with our universe.

Q: But if the jets from the core of the new galaxy push gas out of the voids, why don't they also push gas out of the galaxy, switching off star formation?

A: Because this is a complex, evolved system doing a complex, evolved job. The same dynamo effect that drives gas away from the galaxy’s poles (perpendicular to its disk) is simultaneously, by removing angular momentum from the gas at its equator, allowing that gas to spiral rapidly inward, forming new stars and feeding the jet. Gravity, electromagnetic fields, and pressure gradients combine to create a vast cosmic pump, steadily drawing in fresh gas. This pump can operate continuously for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

Currently, the mainstream theory is, indeed, that jets quench star formation by driving gas out of the galaxy. But that view came from observing mature, relatively nearby galaxies, many billions of years after the Big Bang, where these pumps are older, erratic, running out of fuel, and beginning to switch off, coinciding with the end of rapid star formation. Correlation; not causation. Meanwhile, pre-James Webb Space Telescope, we had no data on the early, high-power phase.

What I predicted back in 2022, and what the James Webb is starting to see strong evidence for, is that, early on, these jets do the opposite – they’re driving star formation, not quenching it.

Q: You say Blowtorch Theory shows we don't need dark matter. But isn't dark matter required to explain galactic rotation, and disc galaxy stability, and gravitational lensing, and the galactic dynamics of dwarf galaxies, and acoustic peaks in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and the Universal Rotation Curve, and…

A: Currently, yes, simply because every outstanding observational problem has dark matter thrown at it, as the only possible explanation. This is partly because dark matter is so fuzzily defined, with so many free parameters, you can massage it to “solve” almost any problem. (Why did your grandmother slowly but steadily move UP the stairs, in defiance of the laws of gravity? Because there was a large halo of dark matter at the top of the stairs, pulling her. See? Problem solved. No need, now, to look for a more complex, evolutionary, dynamic-systems explanation.)

I’m not arguing that blowtorch theory also solves all the other outstanding problems currently explained by dark matter. It doesn’t. I’m making a broader point: that an evolved-universe approach will generalise to solve the other outstanding anomalies. They may well all have quite different explanations. But, as with structure formation, the answers are likely to lie in the sophisticated behaviour of the things we can see, not the simplistic behaviour of a thing we can't. By the way, this makes Blowtorch Theory an excellent fit with David Wiltshire’s Timescape cosmology. (See his important recent paper, “Solution to the cosmological constant problem”.) Timescape deals with Dark Energy’s contribution to structure formation; Blowtorch Theory deals with Dark Matter’s contribution to structure formation. Indeed, it is quite likely that, as we find better, more sophisticated explanations for each of these different anomalies, dark matter will slowly fade away, without any big “eureka!” moment. (Or whatever the negative of “eureka!” is.)

DARK MATTER IS THE MODERN MIASMA

This is a classic example of the Single Variable Fallacy, or maybe better The One-Missing-Piece Illusion. A very human cognitive shortcut that assumes there must be a single missing factor that can explain all discrepancies. We made this mistake before, when we blamed all disease on “miasma” – also known as “bad air” and “night air”. “Miasma” almost-but-not-quite explained everything. (The Black Death! Cholera! Chlamydia! Malaria, whose name literally means bad air in Medieval Italian! Oh, and obesity was caused by inhaling the odor of food…)

“Miasma” was the dominant theory of disease, worldwide, for two thousand years, until the late 19^th century. But the actual answer to “what causes disease?” involved bacteria, and viruses; airborne transmission, and water transmission; vitamin deficiencies, and food spoilage; some bugs growing in the presence of oxygen, some in the absence of oxygen; mosquitos, and fleas; immune system responses, including both under-reactions and over-reactions – and on and on… In other words, we hadn’t remotely explored the behavioural possibility space of the air and water and food we could see. A special, extra kind of air to one-shot all the problems was not required.

Likewise, today, the idea that we have completely explored the possibility space occupied by baryonic matter, and must instead postulate an entirely new, and totally invisible, form of matter to explain baryonic matter’s behaviour… you can see the absurdity, right? You can see that we are making precisely the same mistake?

Evolved biological systems are complex, and self-organising. Their behaviours feature emergent properties, feedback loops, and interactions across multiple scales. If our universe is itself an evolved system, then it's unsurprising that we're making exactly the same mistake, trying to explain its complex emergent properties using linear causal thinking. Evolved systems resist single-cause explanations. Their behaviors emerge and adjust as the rolling result of weird, unpredictable, interacting networks.

Right now, cosmology suffers from a lethal combination of factors – it has baked ΛCDM into every simulation; it uses it as a background assumption that now underlies, and distorts, every paper in astronomy; and it insists that any alternative solution explain every outstanding observational anomaly in one go, single puzzle-piece style – or if you prefer, miasma-style. This fatal triple-combo has crippled the field’s ability to self-correct.

And again, let me emphasise: whether or not dark matter exists, blowtorch theory clearly explains many phenomena, in the specific area of early structure formation, which that theory cannot.

WHAT’S NEW, PUSSYCAT?

So – for those unfamiliar with the field – what’s novel, and what’s not, in this theory?

Not novel: Supermassive black holes exist at the centers of galaxies, some with accretion disks that emit relativistic jets. That’s now mainstream cosmology. Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs), quasars, blazars, Seyfert Galaxies, Fanaroff-Riley Radio Galaxies – all these powerful, inexplicable phenomena eventually turned out to be supermassive black holes, doing things with jets. (Hey, it’s almost as if these black holes, and their jets, might be ubiquitous and important!)

What’s novel in my theory is the idea that all the supermassive black holes must form first, by direct collapse – before galaxies form, and indeed before there’s any significant number of stars, or (probably) any stars at all. (This emerges directly from the application of Darwinian evolutionary logic to universes. It’s not predicted by any other theory, and if I’m wrong, my theory wobbles badly and a wheel falls off. So the theory is falsifiable. But the evidence from the James Webb Space Telescope so far is very, very encouraging.) Yes, this phase transition occurs incredibly early and activates many powerful, sustained, directional jets very strongly, very quickly. But – no new physics are needed to explain it. In fact, Priya Natarajan, Volker Bromm, Marta Volonteri, and others showed 18 years ago that direct-collapse supermassive black holes are mathematically possible, in brilliant work that was largely ignored at the time. (They, too, will get a late, apologetic Nobel Prize.)

So that's blowtorch theory. But it emerges from – it is both predicted by, and explained by – a larger theory about the universe: three-stage cosmological natural selection. Yes, a theory in desperate need of a shorter, slangier, more vivid, less abstract name. (I find myself calling it the Eggiverse theory – in opposition to the mainstream’s Rockiverse – because it describes our evolved universe rapidly developing upward in complexity over time, like an egg, rather than simply disintegrating slowly, like a rock.)

And three-stage cosmological natural selection – Eggiverse theory – builds on Lee Smolin’s original version of cosmological natural selection.

BACKGROUND: LEE SMOLIN’S ORIGINAL THEORY OF COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION (DRAWING ON JOHN WHEELER)

A quick recap for new readers…

Cosmological natural selection assumes that universes reproduce via black holes and big bangs. How? A large mass in a parent universe collapses under its own gravity to form a black hole singularity – an infinitesimal point – that then “bounces”, in a Big Bang, to form a new, expanding, separate bubble of spacetime: a child universe, that exists outside of, and separate from, the parent universe. (The expansion of our own universe since the Big Bang is simply the growth and development to maturity of such a child universe.) If each new universe varies slightly in the fundamental parameters of matter (things like the mass of the electron, or the strength of the strong nuclear force), this will lead to that universe producing either more or fewer black holes, and thus to greater or lesser reproductive success. Over time, this reproduction-with-variation-and-inheritance leads to a Darwinian evolution of universes.

There are analogies with biological evolution: changes in the basic parameters of matter between parent and child universe act like the changes in DNA between biological parents and children: any such variations, or mutations, in the basic parameters of matter will lead to changes in the phenotype of the child universe. (Let’s call it the cosmotype.)

An evolved universe, therefore, constructs itself according to an internal, evolved set of rules baked deep into its matter, just as a baby, or a sprouting acorn, does.

The development of our specific universe, therefore, since its birth in the Big Bang, mirrors the development of an organism; both are complex evolved systems, where (to quote the splendid Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine), the energy that moves through the system organises the system.

But universes have an interesting reproductive advantage over, say, animals.

We know that in our own universe, the (positive) mass energy of matter and its (negative) gravitational energy net out to zero. But that means the amount of energy required to build a universe like ours is essentially… well, none. (See Laurence Krauss’s book, A Universe from Nothing; or Stephen Hawking and James Hartle’s 1983 paper, The Wave Function of the Universe, and Hawking’s later book with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, etc.) Child universes are therefore effectively free to produce. Thus, over time, evolution will favor making more (and smaller) black holes from the same amount of matter. Yes, the black holes will get smaller – but the universes they give birth to, through Big Bangs, will still be full sized. And universes aren’t constrained by a shared environment with limited resources – newborn universes aren’t all competing in a valley with a limited amount of grass. Indeed, each new universe is entirely self-contained and self-sufficient, being both organism and environment – it supplies its own energy for its own development, efficiently and frugally, through stellar fusion, gravitational collapse, et cetera. This means evolution should ultimately favour runaway black hole production. (And that checks out: in the most recent estimate, in 2022, by a team from the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, our universe was estimated to have already generated up to a trillion supermassive black holes – and 40 quintillion stellar-collapse black holes.)

A key implication of all these assumptions (which I first pointed out on July 8^th 2022 – this theory is undergoing rapid development!), is that direct-collapse supermassive black holes must have been the reproductive mechanism for the earliest, most primitive universes. Primitive universes, like early prokaryotic bacteria, reproduced and nothing else – no complex structures, just straightforward reproduction.

This is a simple black hole/big bang reproductive cycle. Or, if you like, a (contracting) black hole to (expanding) white hole cycle.

Therefore, the mass-energy – the primitive matter – expanding from a Big Bang in an early universe would have quickly collapsed back into a small number of extremely large black holes (supermassive or even ultramassive), without forming stars, galaxies, planets, or even complex elements. Those things all evolved much later along the evolutionary timeline that eventually led to our universe.

Such a basic, ancient reproductive strategy would be conserved by evolution, for the obvious reason that any universes that failed to do this – reproduce – would, in evolutionary terms, die out. (That is, such sterile universes would continue, individually, to exist, growing endlessly older inside their own individual bubble of space-time, but would have no offspring.) Similarly, humans, although far more complex than our jawless fish ancestors, still reproduce as they originally did, by fertilizing an egg – a fundamental reproductive strategy necessarily conserved by evolution.

These conserved, direct collapse, supermassive black holes are, in several important ways, nothing like the, far more common, stellar-mass black holes we also find in our universe (which form when a large star runs out of fuel and collapses under its own gravity). Supermassive black holes are hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions of times more massive than stellar-mass black holes; I argue that they must have a completely different formation mechanism (direct collapse); and, as we have seen, they perform totally different, and vital, functions in structuring the early universe.

Clearly seeing these differences is vital to understanding our universe.

Yet, for decades, mainstream cosmology (trapped inside Lambda Cold Dark Matter, a paradigm that only allowed for bottom-up structure formation) simply ignored the possibility of direct-collapse supermassive black holes. Instead they argued that the supermassive black holes we kept finding at the centre of galaxies were just a bunch of stellar-mass black holes in a trenchcoat. That the first stars must have been large; formed large stellar-collapse black holes; these quickly merged, and merged again, and again, then happened to drift to the galactic centre thanks to gravity, and then drank in huge amounts of gas. (Yeah, more random, arbitrary, bottom-up structure formation.) Voilà, an accidental, late-to-form, supermassive black hole…

But, as our ever-improving telescopes get us more and more data, from earlier and earlier, it gets harder and harder to make the maths add up. We are now able to observe supermassive black holes shockingly close to the Big Bang, when the universe was just 3% of its current age. There simply isn’t enough time for them to have formed from lots of smaller stellar-mass black hole mergers.

And so the supermassive black holes in our universe today presumably formed the same way as in our distant ancestral universes: by direct collapse of a massive, smooth gas cloud – without needing to build stars first – very soon after the Big Bang.

But why isn't our universe still fine-tuned by evolution to turn all its gas into supermassive black holes immediately after the Big Bang? Because, over time, it evolved a new, sophisticated, multi-stage reproductive cycle that takes billions of years. There are many analogies for this in biology; we know this is what evolution does. Primitive bacteria, for example, reproduce a single all-purpose cell in 20 minutes; complex beings like humans reproduce trillions of specialised cells, in a more complex process that takes decades. Both are successful, but in their own evolutionary contexts.

So here, the unit of selection isn’t a single galaxy; it’s the entire universe – a trillion galaxies contained within a single, expanding membrane of spacetime, like the trillions of cells contained by a human’s skin. And what matters is reproduction (black hole production) over its full lifespan.

THAT THIRTEEN-SYLLABLE THEORY AGAIN

TIMELINE: To fully understand this, you’ll need the three-stage model of cosmological natural selection. (Good old Eggiverse theory.)

• 1990s: Smolin’s original theory was a limited, single-stage model because, back then, it was still assumed all black holes, whatever their size, were made out of stellar-collapse black holes.

• 2000s: Vidal, Smart, Price and Kane expanded this to a two-stage model, adding technologically-produced small black holes. (This explained why evolved universes might generate life – a brilliant conceptual breakthrough, again overlooked at the time.)

• 2020s: I develop the three-stage model, incorporating direct-collapse supermassive black holes – the model which led to blowtorch theory, and which generates the predictions we’re seeing here.

THE THREE-STAGE MODEL OF COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION

STAGE 1: DIRECT COLLAPSE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES

Right at the start, in a phase transition shortly after the big bang, a relatively small number of supermassive black holes quickly form by direct collapse. (Very roughly a trillion, of assorted sizes.)

That is the original reproductive mechanism for universes, conserved by evolution.

STAGE 2: STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLES

However, these supermassive black holes only use up a fraction of the gas in the universe. They then shape and direct much of the remaining gas so as to form galaxies around themselves – one galaxy (containing hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions of stars) per supermassive black hole. These galaxies thus eventually generate many more stellar-mass black holes than the initial set of supermassive ones. (Thus, overall, far more black holes – offspring – per unit mass.) This more complex, highly efficient method of reproduction evolved later in the history of universes and has likewise been conserved, because it leads to…

STAGE 3: TECHNOLOGICALLY PRODUCED SMALL BLACK HOLES

In a more sophisticated stage 3 universe, after two or three rounds of star formation, galaxies have built out (through fusion) and distributed (through supernova explosions) the periodic table of all the elements.

This allows planets and moons to form around third-round stars like our own sun. (And stanets and ploons to form in open space… but that’s another story.) Sunshine and/or gravitational energy then drive the development of the complex organic chemistry of biology: Biology is the first half of the periodic table coming to life. Eventually, that life, rapidly self-complexifying on countless billions of habitable worlds per galaxy, attains intelligence and technological ability. (It has swiftly done so on our own perfectly average planet – so we know this happens.) Technology is the second half of the periodic table coming to life. At which point, those intelligent, technology-wielding lifeforms begin creating vast quantities of extremely small black holes for energy production.

Biology is the first half of the periodic table coming to life.

Technology is the second half of the periodic table coming to life.

-Me (trying to boil this whole theory down into t-shirt memes)

Q: Why black holes?

A: Because you can just chuck any matter at all into them, and they can convert up to 42% of its mass into energy, making them the most efficient energy source in our universe. (And, as my friend Yogi has pointed out, the most sustainable – you could keep a civilization and its ecosystem alive by this method long after all the uranium’s been used up; indeed, long after all the stars have gone out.) By comparison, nuclear fission converts only 0.1% of mass into energy, and fusion 0.7%. So, any intelligent species optimizing for energy efficiency (and sustainability) will eventually converge on small black hole production. (Optimal size is roughly Mount-Everest-mass.) As the production of countless small black holes by technology-wielding lifeforms means huge reproductive success for that universe, such life will be intensely selected for, and strongly conserved. Most universes along our evolutionary branch should, by now, generate such lifeforms. Again, that’s because such Stage 3 universes will produce, over their lifetime, far more black holes per unit mass than will either Stage 1 or Stage 2 universes.

HOW THE BLOWTORCH THEORY MAKES EVOLUTIONARY SENSE

This third reproductive mechanism is far more complex than the first two (it’s more highly evolved!), and it requires the individual universe to have a much longer active lifespan. In particular, it needs multiple rounds of star formation to take place within the individual universe, over billions of years, to build out and distribute the entire periodic table – and thus planets, moons, life, and eventually, technology.

If our universe were to use up all its gas early, just to make a few more first-round, low-metallicity stars and simple stellar-mass black holes, we’d never reach this third and most reproductively successful stage.

So that pure hydrogen gas left over from the Big Bang has to be carefully rationed and delivered to spiral galaxies over billions of years. But it also needs to be enriched – because you can’t easily make stars out of pure hydrogen and helium alone. You need heavier elements – rather annoyingly dubbed “metals” by astronomers (even when, like nitrogen and oxygen, they’re not metals). In spiral galaxies, first-round stars blow up and distribute these “metals” back into the pure hydrogen that’s streaming in from the filaments. That enriched gas then gathers in the specialised regions in the arms of spiral galaxies we call “stellar nurseries”, ready for the next round of star formation. (Stellar nurseries… Interesting name, huh? I suspect that, at a deep subconscious level, many astronomers already know this is an efficient, evolved, quasi-biological process.)

So spiral galaxies can store, channel, enrich, and drip-feed this primal hydrogen gas back to their stellar nurseries, where carbon and oxygen from past supernovae help refrigerate it (and enrich it), allowing it to collapse to form next-round stars. This absurdly intricate process is driven by the delicately balanced interplay of gravitational and electromagnetic forces. It’s clearly a fine-tuned system, evolved for optimal star-planet-moon-life-technology creation. Why “clearly fine-tuned?” Because such a result is unbelievably unlikely – yet, look around you, that's what it does. (Just as Fred Hoyle predicted that the fusion process in stars was fine-tuned to produce and distribute the elements – because look around you, that's what it does.)

EXCEPTIONS PROVE RULES: ELLIPTICAL GALAXIES

But let’s take a quick look at elliptical galaxies. These are 10-15% of all galaxies, with roughly spherical shapes, intense but early star formation – and long-term struggles to replenish their gas. Lacking the intricate gas management system of spiral galaxies, ellipticals burn out quickly, typically failing to form the large amounts of the full suite of elements essential for planets, life, and tech. Ellipticals make SOME elements, and distribute them, obviously, as their larger stars run out of fuel and blow up as supernovae – but they don’t go through multiple rounds of star formation, over billions of years, methodically building out ever-greater amounts of heavier elements by recycling and refining them, in the way spirals do. And yes, some ellipticals are still active, as other galaxies crash into them, bringing fresh gas – but most are red and dead.

So what’s the story with ellipticals? Well, let me speculate: if our universe is the result of the evolutionary process I outlined above, then they’re probably the vestiges of an earlier cosmic age, like our own vestigial tailbone, or the fur in our armpits. All galaxies would've been ellipticals (or similar) at Stage Two, when only rapid star-making mattered. (Ellipticals are brilliant at extremely rapid star-making!)

EVOLUTIONARY TRACES: TAU, MUON, ELECTRON

Evolution moves on, but it drags elements of its evolutionary past around with it, it can’t simply make a clean break. Similarly, the three-stage model of cosmological natural selection explains why three kinds of electron can be produced in our universe – but only one usually is, under normal conditions. Extremely heavy tau electrons (roughly 3,500 times the mass of a normal electron), and heavy muons (roughly 200 times heavier), are presumably fossil particles from stage one and stage two respectively. (Interestingly, the Nobel-Prize-winning Japanese physicist Yoichiro Nambu intuited this as far back as 1985, in his wonderful essay Directions of Particle Physics, but had no theory to explain it.) Just to make it clear, this is much more speculative than the theory it’s based on. But it’s a speculation I find intriguing, and you might find interesting.

• Evolutionary Stage 1: An extremely heavy electron (the tau) made evolutionary sense when all you had to do was maximise immediate direct-collapse black holes. Mass was king! The positive and negative particles probably had roughly the same mass back then, but it didn’t matter; they weren’t building anything complicated.

• Evolutionary Stage 2: A less heavy (but still pretty heavy!) electron (the muon) would have been ideal if you still needed to make some supermassive black holes, but were now optimising for, more numerous, stellar-collapse black holes. You only needed to be able to make a couple of primitive elements, through primitive fusion.

• And Evolutionary Stage 3: Our modern, lightweight electron was the evolutionary breakthrough that allowed the assembly, by fusion, of many more (more complex) elements, and thus complex chemistry, life, and technology – optimising for FAR more numerous technologically-produced black holes…

All universes, like all biological DNA-based organisms, are forever a little messy; forever transitional between what they once were, and what they might yet be.

For example, the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that originally evolved to drive efficient stellar fusion in Stage 2 universes, through the CNO cycle, were later exapted (adapted for a new purpose by evolution) as the basis for biological life in Stage 3 universes.

Likewise, just look through a telescope, and you can see handfuls of the red-and-dead elliptical galaxies that must have dominated those Stage 2 universes.

Fire up a particle accelerator, and you can bring to life ghost particles like the tau and muon, still implicit in our quantum fields, even though they have long been banished from our everyday world by the ongoing evolution of the other parameters of matter.

Those traces of our evolutionary past, embedded in our present, mean that we can trace the evolutionary history of universes, even though we only have a single specimen to examine – the universe we are embedded inside, that we are part of. The universe that recently generated us, as part of its developmental process. The universe that is coming to know itself through us; act on itself through us. The universe in which we are currently helping sand to think.

Okay. As Tyler Cowen gently pointed out to me, when I showed him an earlier draft of this, a good theory makes predictions.

So here are some.

PREDICTIONS

Supermassive black holes form first, in a phase change that precedes stars and galaxies

We will see a wave of direct collapse supermassive black hole formation (numbering a trillion or so), well inside the first 100 million years after the Big Bang. (And almost certainly inside the first fifty million.) This wave precedes star and galaxy formation.

Those early supermassive black holes will be found to spin at close to the Kerr limit

As all the angular momentum in the entire vast cloud is conserved, the spin rate of these direct collapse supermassive black holes will approach the Kerr black hole spin limit (very close to the speed of light). Later mergers, plus infills of randomly oriented gas and stars, etc, will often lower that spin rate, making them less efficient: but they are born at close to maximum efficiency.

Those extremely fast-spinning, efficient supermassive black holes then generate stars and galaxies

It is the supermassive black holes which generate the galaxies around themselves, by attracting, shocking, and enriching the surrounding gas to precipitate waves of star formation.

Meanwhile, they generate the cosmic web

A trillion quasars switch on immediately, blasting out powerful, sustained relativistic jets, which create both the low-pressure, lightly-magnetized cavities and the high-pressure, highly-magnetized pipes that merge and expand to form the voids and filaments of the cosmic web.

But it’s simply hard to see anything at all from the first fifty million years after the Big Bang, let alone the detailed picture I’ve just described – even with the James Webb Space Telescope. So here are some specifics we can look for, using a variety of methods, some available right now:

Gravitational waves: The Popcorn Signature

Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime, caused by large masses moving asymmetrically. As our gravitational wave detectors (like the wonderful Pulsar Timing Arrays I wrote about here) grow more sensitive, and able to locate events further and further back in space and time, we will find the gravitational-wave traces of that original brief era of direct collapse supermassive black hole formation coming from all over the sky, in lots of faint, overlapping, low-frequency gravitational waves. It’s true that any initial perfectly symmetrical collapses wouldn’t generate waves (no rough edges = no splash = no ripple), but as the smoothness breaks down, the later, slightly less symmetrical collapses should, as should any early mergers.

Being a phase transition, it should take place over a relatively tight period of a few million years (and probably at some point inside the first 50 million years). As such, the overall signal (the combination of all the signals) should have a steep attack; a short, extremely intense peak; and a slightly longer, less steep decay: Pop… pop… poppopPOPPOPPOPpop… pop… pop… … … pop. Rather like the production of a batch of popcorn. Let's call that the Popcorn Signature: The gravitational wave counterpart to the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Speaking of which, I also predict…

(Takes a deep breath….)

A statistical relationship between cosmic microwave background quantum fluctuations and supermassive black holes

If fluctuations indeed seed direct collapses, there should be a statistical relationship between the range of sizes and relative numbers of the blown-up quantum fluctuations we see in the cosmic microwave background, and the range of sizes and relative numbers of the supermassive black holes we see in the very early universe. (Before any later mergers distort the relationship.) Also…

Signatures of chain-reaction collapses

If the direct collapse of one region of gas can compress neighboring regions into collapse (similar to the raindrop-cascades in clouds here on Earth), we might be able to detect “clustered timing” effects: bursts of supermassive black hole formation in short intervals, slightly offset in space and time as shockwaves push adjacent regions over the collapse threshold. Basically, look for non-random clustering of the earliest quasar ignition, in redshift slices. (“Collapse cascades.”) And…

Extremely early, rapid, curved starbursts triggered by jet-driven shocks

Look for shock-geometry features in extremely early high-redshift galaxies: arcs, circles, or cones of newly formed stars, in rings that are centred on the active, or recently active, supermassive black hole. There will be more of this the earlier you get. (Later, once the jets switch off, ongoing star formation will occur more frugally in the spiral arms, as the full gas circulatory system establishes itself.)

OK, let’s move on to filaments and voids.

Uniform field orientation along filaments

If powerful jets – rather than slow, random, gravitational infall – formed filaments, then we should see highly correlated magnetic field orientations over incredibly long stretches of filament. Not the arbitrary, patchy, turbulent, broken-jig-saw-puzzle fields of a filament randomly assembled by gravity.

Rifle barrel filaments

Let me add a twist to that. Additionally, the rapidly spinning central supermassive black hole – because it causes spacetime to rotate at speeds close to the speed of light near the event horizon – should impart a continuous, ongoing twist to the magnetic fieldlines of the jet as it accelerates away. (As first suggested by Roger Blandford and Roman Znajek in 1977, and since confirmed, in 2010, by Keiichi Asada et al, in a very smart observational paper.) This should result in a helical, or spiral, magnetic field, which stabilises the jet of plasma, leading to less turbulence. (Similarly, the spiral groove which lines a rifle barrel causes the bullet to spin, stabilizing it.)

I predict this helical magnetic field – this rifled gun barrel design – will be inherited by the filament, allowing plasma to flow along it more swiftly, and crucially with far less turbulence, than you would expect in a filament randomly assembled by gravity alone. We are already seeing signs that gas is mysteriously low in turbulence while flowing along filaments, only becoming turbulent as it leaves the pipe of the filament and enters the open space of the cluster (the node). See, for a great example, the recent eROSITA X-ray observations of the Abell 3667 cluster of galaxies, where a HUGE filament of gas, feeding into the cluster,​ delivers gas gently, with very low turbulence, until it actually spills out of the filament into the cluster proper, and becomes extremely turbulent.

Blowtorch theory explains why. So, look for helical fields in filaments.

Weak internal fields in voids, surrounded by stronger bubble-like surface fields, with “seams”

A slightly more technical one, but a nice one: If voids are made from the merger (and later expansion) of cavities or bubbles formed early by powerful electromagnetic jets, voids should therefore have weak internal magnetic fields, surrounded by stronger electromagnetic “skins” with bubble-like field topologies. Additionally, we might see thin transition zones, with a different field topology, along the seam where the bubbles meet and merge. (Imagine the lines where the balloon skins meet in a balloon animal.) Very sensitive polarised-light surveys, like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), might detect abrupt changes in Faraday rotation across these seams, which should show shell-like or patch-boundary field structures. (Faraday rotation is what happens when polarised light passes through a magnetised plasma: those polarised lightwaves get rotated, and the longer their wavelength, the more they get rotated. So light should be rotated differently either side of the seam... and VERY differently by the seam itself.)

Residual shocks along the boundary arcs where bubbles meet and merge might also still be detectable as extremely faint synchrotron or X-ray relics.

Cosmic rays might follow filament field funnels

If filaments are rifled magnetic pipes, they might guide and accelerate some cosmic rays. Future cosmic-ray observatories could look for higher cosmic ray numbers aligned with known filament structures. I predict this will turn out to be the explanation for the unexpected transparency of the universe to very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays. They are spending much of their journey being accelerated down the barrel of an electromagnetic cannon.

Distinct void density profiles and sharp boundaries

This leads to another prediction: the transition between void interior and filament wall should be more abrupt than the gently sloping, radial density gradient any purely gravitational simulation typically produces. (With or without dark matter.) Right now our instruments do not have the resolution to see such a sharp transition, and are assuming, rather than observing, relatively smooth density gradients at the void/filament boundaries. So, more formally (clears throat): blowtorch theory predicts a near step-function slope over a smaller transition zone than ΛCDM-based void analyses.

Statistical relationship between supermassive black hole size and adjacent void sizes

A rather obvious one, but… Statistically, the larger supermassive black holes should tend to be found at the far ends of the larger voids (along their longer axis), as they generated those voids. (And smaller ones at the far ends of smaller voids, yeah.)

Caution: this won't be a simple one-to-one mapping. Contemporary voids are generally formed from the earlier mergers of a number of cavities. Also, bear in mind, later mergers of not just voids, but galaxies, and supermassive black holes – plus spacetime expansion, gravity, and kinematics of all kinds – will make these relationships less obvious over time.

OK, that should be enough predictions, even for Tyler.

But I’ll just note that the theory also potentially explains a bunch of other puzzling phenomena, such as the observed large-scale asymmetry in galaxy spin directions, and why quasar polarisation appears to be coherently aligned over billions of lightyears. (Coherent early processes lead to coherent later outcomes! Also, black holes give birth to spinning universes!) Plus it potentially solves the missing satellites problem, the cusp/core problem, the galaxy rotation problem, and the Hubble tension… I am itching to write another page speculating WILDLY BUT BRILLIANTLY on each of these, but this post is already too long. (Shades of Fermat’s “I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition, which this margin is too narrow to contain”, I know, I know – but subscribe, now, for free, and I’ll email you those posts as I write them.)

To sum up:

Lambda Cold Dark Matter was, and is, a brave attempt to solve a lot of difficult problems in one go. Many great people gave it the best years of their lives. (And, to any of you reading: I deeply respect your work, and I totally understand how every decision seemed to make sense at the time, as a will-o-the-wisp led you deeper and deeper into the swamp. I don’t want to fight you, I want to liberate you. Join me.)

But, tragically, after fifty years of development, ΛCDM remains an improvised, incoherent, after-the-fact, ad hoc description of a random bunch of puzzling stuff that, it now turns out, may not even have a common explanation. It’s an infinitely flexible framework, not a predictive theory. When it has made predictions, they have been consistently proved wrong by observation. Have a couple turned out OK? Sure! (I’ll give you the CMB power spectrum, nice one.) But its overall hit rate is still terrible. In general, most of its predictions have been made in haste, with a bit of parameter tweaking, based on a stream of slowly emerging data, rather than genuinely preceding and predicting that data.

ΛCDM has six free parameters – total matter density, dark energy density, Hubble constant, amplitude of matter fluctuations, spectral index of initial fluctuations, and optical depth from re-ionization – and every single one of these has been repeatedly tweaked in the light of emerging new data. That’s fine, that’s what you have to do… but it’s been fifty years now, and the tweaking never stops. There’s simply nothing solid there. Meanwhile, every failure of prediction is immediately rebranded as “an exciting opportunity for new physics!” Ah, new physics. Dark matter, after fifty years, still requires new particles, and their new physics, but can't seem to catch a glimpse of even one. (Recall that the Large Hadron Collider found the Higgs boson exactly where predicted; but it didn’t find any dark matter, despite exploring all the energy ranges where such stuff was predicted to be.)

By contrast, three-stage cosmological natural selection, and the blowtorch theory that emerges from it, is the coherent description of an equally coherent functional complex system. It has already made extraordinarily successful predictions, since confirmed by observation. Indeed, it has now just made a whole bunch of new predictions, which you can go check on: it is not afraid of being tested, and, unlike ΛCDM, is happy to risk being falsified. It has enormous explanatory power. It requires no new particles and no new physics. Does it need a lot of work, to mathematicize, test, and validate it? Sure! But it’s doing pretty good so far, for a three-year-old theory (based, yes, on an earlier theory that is, itself, only half the age of ΛCDM), developed by a handful of people occasionally talking over coffee, and WhatsApp, with essentially no institutional backing, or funding – particularly when its opponent has had a fifty-year head-start, and all the resources of all the world’s best scientists across every relevant field.

There is a story told by the famous physicist Victor (Viki) Weisskopf, which I would like you to read, and really internalise, really think about, for a minute, particularly if you work in the fields of cosmology, or astrophysics, or astronomy. (By a poignant coincidence, it takes place at the very observatory from which Stephen Gregory and Laird A. Thompson first discovered voids.)

“Several years ago I received an invitation to give a series of lectures at the University of Arizona at Tucson. I was delighted to accept because it would give me a chance to visit the Kitts Peak astronomical observatory, which had a very powerful telescope I had always wanted to look through. I asked my hosts to arrange an evening to visit the observatory so I could look directly at some interesting objects through the telescope. But I was told this would be impossible because the telescope was constantly in use for photography and other research activities. There was no time for simply looking at objects. In that case, I replied, I would not be able to come to deliver my talks. Within days I was informed that everything had been arranged according to my wishes. We drove up the mountain on a wonderfully clear night. The stars and the Milky Way glistened intensely and seemed almost close enough to touch. I entered the cupola and told the technicians who ran the computer-activated telescope that I wanted to see Saturn and a number of the galaxies. It was a great pleasure to observe with my own eyes and with the utmost clarity all the details I had only seen on photographs before. As I looked at all that, I realized that the room had begun to fill with people, and one by one they too peeked into the telescope. I was told that these were astronomers attached to the observatory, but they had never before had the opportunity of looking directly at the objects of their investigations.”

–Victor Weisskopf, from The Joy of Insight.

OK, stop reading for a second, and soak that up.

(If you didn’t stop; seriously, stop, and soak. Maybe even read it again.)

Victor finishes that story with the words,

“I can only hope that this encounter made them realize the importance of such direct contacts.”

Yeah, me too, Victor. Me too.

OK, time to choose.

1.) Dead matter, with random properties, blindly obeying arbitrary laws, in a one-shot universe, that appeared from nowhere, for no reason, 13.8 billion years ago – before which nothing at all existed. Oh yeah, and it just stumbled from being some hot gas to being VERY VERY COMPLICATED INDEED JUST LOOK AT YOUR DOG OR A TREE OR YOUR PHONE completely by accident, with no backstory, no preparation, no explanation; no evolutionary history. Oh, and none of this means anything.

Or…

2.) Sophisticated matter fine-tuned, by a long evolutionary process, to swiftly and efficiently come to life, self-assembling upward into complexity in multiple integrated steps, due to fine-tuned laws; the latest in a long line of ever-more-sophisticated universes, born from a parent universe 13.8 billion years ago, and going somewhere, with us as the growing tip, the point where the universe comes to know itself, take control of its own growth, and direct it out into an infinitely rich possibility space.

Cold dark matter, or evolutionary cosmology?

Rockiverse, or Eggiverse?

Look inside you. Look around you. Don’t think about a theory – theirs or mine. Actually look at the universe of which you are part.

Now choose your fighter…

NOW WHAT?

So, what can you do about this? Well, this is a classic paradigm shift. So what you can do depends on who you are.

If you’re a science journalist: Get in touch. Every article on the early universe, for the past two and a half years, has quoted some scientist saying “Nobody predicted this!” That has to stop. Three-stage cosmological natural selection – dear old Eggiverse theory! – predicted all of this. Let’s get it into the conversation, where it belongs. The reasons for its exclusion have been sociological, not scientific. I realise there are no bad guys here, it’s not a conspiracy. Cosmologists, understandably, don’t have the biology background to apply an evolutionary theory to their work, and evolutionary biologists, understandably, haven’t even heard of a theory at the fringes of cosmology. But that has left it in a knowledge shadow: help me get it out into the light.

If you’re a cosmologist, astrophysicist, or astronomer: I need you. (Also! Evolutionary biologists, chemists, geologists, systems scientists: the implications run right through the sciences.) Let’s work together. I’ll be moving to the Bay Area soon, to set up an Evolutionary Cosmology working group of domain experts to develop this theory, and break it into the mainstream. You can think of the working group as...

• A startup, to disrupt cosmology.

• A heist team, to crack astrophysics.

• An Ocean’s 11 for astronomy.

Doesn’t that sound more fun than spending 70% of your time doing paperwork for National Science Foundation grants that can be abolished on a governmental whim halfway through the project? Join me!

If you’re a billionaire intrigued by all this: Reach out. So far, this project has run on small grants from the Irish Arts Council; Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures fund; Jim O'Shaughnessy’s O’Shaughnessy Ventures; and the support of paid subscribers. (Plus my, inherently unreliable, publishing royalties to keep us going between grants.) I’d rather not waste so much time chasing funding; I need a Medici who’s willing to back a remarkably affordable intellectual revolution. (If you’re a Medici in a hurry, the PayPal link is here; if you're not in a hurry, let’s talk.)

And if you're not a journalist, a scientist, or a billionaire, just a reader who finds this work exciting? Tell everyone you know, that you think might be interested. Forward this post to friends. Talk about it in pubs, and labs, and cafés. At parties, and bus stops, and conferences. Think about it, and throw ideas into the comments.

We have discovered a new intellectual continent: it needs explorers. You can be one.

(Thanks to Jamie Rumbelow, John Caldemeyer, Sophie Gough Fives, Tyler Cowen, Digivijay Singh, Jenny Wagner, Kevin Kelly, PJ King, Rohit Krishnan, Solana Joy, Yogi Jaeger, Ananyo Bhattacharya, Ben Yeoh, and Adam Mastroianni for suggestions, and for reading drafts. I acted on some of their excellent advice, but also ignored much excellent advice – so nothing bad, wrong, or irritating that remains is their fault.)

Some background on Jim O’Shaughnessy: Jim has run a lot of mutual funds, and written a bunch of books; his latest is Two Thoughts. He is also executive chair of the board of Stability AI, and runs O’Shaughnessy Ventures. (Who, full disclosure, awarded me an OSV grant last year to work on these theories.) I hugely enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you will too. I’ve cleaned up the full transcript, and laid it out below. (Partly to feed these ideas to the ravenous AIs that now stalk us all! But as a human, you’re still better off watching or listening to this one, as much of the information is in the delivery. Or, put another way, there’s a lot of waving my hands about and swearing, which might amuse some of you.) Video is in full, above (and again, below, where the transcript starts): it’s also available on

Youtube…

As a Spotify podcast…

And on Apple Podcasts.

If you want to skip the biographical stuff at the start, and just head straight to the discussion of cosmological natural selection, it begins 39 minutes into the video.

If you want to skip to it in the transcript below, just click here, and you will be whizzed there as if by magic.

Please do share this with any friends you think might be interested in these ideas: as my wife’s reaction clearly shows, it’s a great entry point.

And now I’ll hand over to Jim’s written introduction to this podcast episode, from the Infinite Loops website.

JIM O’SHAUGHNESSY’S INTRODUCTION

Julian Gough sums up his career as follows: “I just sit in my room and write.”

Well, I think being an acclaimed children’s author, novelist, stage playwright, poet and top ten Irish musician is a little more impressive than he’s letting on… Oh, and I didn’t even mention that he wrote the ending to the computer game Minecraft!

His current project, The Egg and The Rock, puts all of this to shame. This book, which Julian is writing in public on Substack, seeks to do no less than redescribe the universe, arguing that is not some random, dead, purposeless sack of chemicals, but instead a living, evolving organism.

Julian joins me to discuss why the arc of human evolution bends towards man-made black holes, the hidden catastrophe at the heart of materialist science, the strange life of subterranean ice aliens, and MUCH more!

This was such an interesting conversation. We’ve shared some edited highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

[Julian here, butting in to say: This is a link to the Infinite Loops Substack, which is full of good stuff.]

Highlights

The Scientific Method Vs. Human Nature

“But the scientific method is in conflict with human nature. That's why it's so powerful. It's a way of escaping our human nature, but we can't escape it, and we constantly go back into it, and we're social apes. So what you end up with is social ape dynamics inside scientific fields, that can lock them off from truth over time. And that keeps happening. There's a sort of start-up energy to scientific fields, when it's just a bunch of guys, some gals, but historically, it was a lot of guys, coming up with a bunch of ideas. And there's like a hundred people know about this in the whole world, and they all meet up sometimes. And that's when all the breakthroughs happen. And then, the start-ups turn into corporations, and the corporations have structures. And you end up with this kind of management bloat, and you end up with what has happened to practically every science. They've gone from start-up energy to corporate bloat.”

The Strange Life of Subterranean Ice Aliens

“I am predicting lots of life in this universe. So where is it? I think this, what I've just described to you, gives a possible answer to that, right? This is an interesting one. If most life is in fact in the liquid water oceans of icy moons, imagine what their view of the universe is. They're under a hundred miles of steel-hard ice. They develop a civilization. They have no idea they're in a universe. They don't know why the center is warm and the surface is cold. They don't know it's a surface. It's just, that's the end. They don't have stars in the sky. They don't see a sun, they can't see planets. Would they ever dig through the ice a hundred miles and then fall into space? I don't know what the logic or the psychology of any kind of civilization that develops under those conditions is. I can't see space-faring civilizations coming out of that. I don't know. They may never leave.”

The Universe Is Behaving Like a… Dog?

“A storm is coming. Cosmology is going to get turned upside down by this, when they finally realize it's an evolved universe. What's here is, they are looking at a sack of chemicals, right? And they're trying to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals, and they're using really nice, simple models to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals. But the sack of chemicals is a dog. It's a dog, okay? Dogs do things for dog reasons, because they evolved, right? And if you're looking at the same sodium and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, but it's a dog, it's not just a bag of random chemicals. It just behaves differently. It develops differently over time. Look again at the universe. Is it behaving like a bag of chemicals randomly chosen with random properties, or is it behaving like a fucking dog? It's behaving like a dog.”

The Efficiency of Black Hole Energy

“Humans, and other intelligent life forms on other worlds, can tap, as David Deutsch would say, anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. Eventually, we're going to tap anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. And what are the limits of that, in our universe? What's the ultimate form of energy release in our universe that's realistically tap-able inside the laws of physics? It's black holes. If you can artificially make small black holes, you can use them to convert up to 42% of the mass of a piece of matter into energy, 42%. That's an incredible rate of return. Fusion in the sun, fusion reactions only give you 0.7% of the mass back as energy. Fission, primitive nuclear bombs, fission will only give you 0.1% of the mass back as energy. So 42 percent's unreal. And any technologically advanced civilization is eventually probably going to technologically produce small black holes for energy production, because that's the best you're going to get.”

Books & Articles Mentioned

• The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science; by Robert Anton Wilson

• Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge; by Paul Feyerabend

• What the Tortoise Said to Achilles; by Lewis Carroll

• The Life of the Cosmos; by Lee Smolin

• What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell; by Erwin Schrödinger

• Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology; by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

• The Bhagavad Gita

• Did the Universe evolve?; by Lee Smolin

• The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?; by Robin Hanson

Transcript & Links

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A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRO

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I have been looking forward to talking to today's guest ever since I discovered him. My guest today is Julian Gough. Julian, it's going to take me five minutes to go over all of your accomplishments. You've written five beloved children's books, the first of which was nominated... Or actually, did you get Irish Book of the Year in 2016? You were nominated or shortlisted?

Julian Gough:

No, I didn't win that, though I won a prize in France for it, but the Irish never quite accept their writers till we're dead. But I have high hopes after my death. No, I was shortlisted. It was great. It was wonderful. It was all great.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I love that comment about the Irish. That's right. "We'll give him the credit, but after he's gone."

Julian Gough:

Yeah. I'd be a bit worried if I got it in my lifetime.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, that would be a bad thing. So five incredible children's books. Four highly acclaimed novels on humans, one of which I am reading right now.

Julian Gough:

Interesting.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

A couple of BBC radio plays about God knows what. A charming stage play about, I love this one, an economic catastrophe caused by goats, and for our younger viewers and listeners, the ending of Minecraft known as The End Poem. Julian, welcome. We're not going to talk about those today. We're going to about what you're actually working on right now, but welcome.

Julian Gough:

Oh, good. Well, thanks, Jim. It's wonderful to be here. Yeah. Ever since I discovered you're a big Robert Anton Wilson fan, I've been interested in talking to you. It's an interesting global underground community of big Robert Anton Wilson fans.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Totally true, which I discovered later in life, as I was telling you before we started to record. I discovered Wilson through a rather circuitous path. A friend of mine had written a piece about why people should read Jed McKenna, or as I like to call him, the fictional character known as Jed McKenna, because he is a fictional character that tells us that we're all fictional characters and that there's no duality. Everything is non-dual. We all are part of the universe. We'll get to that later when we're talking about your current book, but the whole thing was through Dan, but then Rick and Morty. I don't know if you…

Julian Gough:

I'm aware of Rick and Morty. I'm quite aware of them, but I haven't really gone deep. I suspect I might not come back.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Julian, if nothing else gets accomplished by us chatting with one another, you absolutely must watch the entire... Because you make the comparison about The Simpsons actually covering a more broad and interesting group of topics than any novel that was written recently.

Julian Gough:

Yeah, the first nine or ten series, certainly. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Oh, you have such a treat in store for you, because Rick and Morty does that on steroids. But I wasn't even finished. You also were a very famous musician, singing in Toasted Heretic.

Julian Gough:

Locally famous. Locally famous.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, well, you hit some top 10 lists.

Julian Gough:

Yeah, yeah. Top 10 in Ireland. But yeah, to be fair, if all your relatives buy your single in Ireland, you've got a reasonable chance. But yeah, in Ireland, I would be surprisingly well known for a guy who just hides in his room and writes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And you are also the writer in residence or have been at Trinity, at the University of Limerick, at the University of Singapore. My god, I love how you demur and say, "I just sit in my room and write." You certainly seem to get around a lot, Julian.

Julian Gough:

I sat around in Singapore in my room and wrote. I was writer in residence. They send you over in a box and they don't even take you out. "Look, we have a writer." They point at the box. It's the perfect job. I love it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, that way you avoided all of their draconian laws about not spitting on the sidewalk or chewing gum. You're much safer in your room, I'm sure.

Julian Gough:

(Laughs)

WRITING THE EGG AND THE ROCK IN PUBLIC

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Today I really want to talk about your new nonfiction book called The Egg and the Rock.

Julian Gough:

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

What's very interesting to me... Well, it's very interesting to me in many, many regards, but the first thing that grabbed me is you're doing it in public. First off, I think that being creative, engaging in any artistic endeavor, requires a lot of courage just in and of itself, but to do it in public? Wow.

Julian Gough:

Well, it's the first one I've done in public.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

For a guy who sits in his room... Yeah. But what made you decide to do it in public, and in the format that you're doing it?

Julian Gough:

This is a very different book to my previous books. My previous books, I would not show them to anyone until they were done. I knew what I wanted to do, and I was very in control of the material. Well, you've never in control of the material, but I knew what I wanted to do. Even when what I wanted to do was extremely weird, I would just chase my obsessions and get it to the point where I was completely happy, and then I'd show it to someone. And then there was an editorial process and it went back and forth, or it got rejected or it got accepted, or whatever.

This one's different because this one, it's about the universe. It's about all of the universe. It's about the pre-history of the universe. The scale of this is so ridiculous. Look, I’m a writer. Writers have an ego. They're putting their ideas out into the world. They think they're great. I think I'm great, but I'm not great enough to do this on my own. Jesus. So I really wanted to try out everything in public, make my mistakes in public, have my successes in public, get feedback, get feedback, get feedback, build a community for the ideas, get other scientists involved who are domain experts, because I'm not a domain expert here, but who is? It's the universe.

So I've developed an extremely broad knowledge base over the last decade because I've been working on this book for over a decade, but in private for the first eight or ten years really, and it's only in the last two and a half years I've gone public. I've decided I had to start doing it in public. It's been so good. It's been an amazing experience.

I was terrified doing it. Yeah. I didn't want to do it. No writer wants to do stuff in public when it's not finished, but I had this moment that unfortunately, there was... Not unfortunately. Fortunately; it's turned out great. There was this moment that came up where I realized I had to start talking about these ideas in public because there was a way to test them. There was a way to test them, and it was time-constrained.

I had to get some of the ideas out before the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's and the European Space Agency’s and the Canadian Space Agency’s telescope. This new extremely powerful, extremely technologically accomplished infrared telescope was going to be launched, it was going to be online, and it was going to send back data, and I realized that if the theory I was working on about the universe had any value, it should be able to make predictions about the early universe that could then be either proved or disproved, found to be accurate or not, by the James Webb Space Telescope.

So suddenly I had a clock running, after a decade of just luxuriating in my room and just thinking, "Well, I love this theory. It's such fun. When the book is eventually finished in a decade, I think people will be interested." And suddenly I realized, "The timer is really running on this." So I started thinking everything through from first principles and I put some predictions up on Substack on the internet, and I sent them out to some subscribers that I'd built up, and suddenly the whole game was happening in public, and that's really changed things in a really interesting way.

That's the reason we're talking. The reason O'Shaughnessy Ventures got involved in the project, Emergent Ventures, Tyler Cowen's thing, got involved in the project. It's all because I started talking about this in public. And a lot of scientists are now interested. They're intrigued. It's been a wonderful experience, but yeah, it's very scary. You have no idea how scared I was the night I put up my predictions online and sent them out to the subscribers in public, when I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I just didn't want to press Send. I didn't want to press Publish. But yeah. Yeah, so this is an unusual book for me. I don't know what I'm doing either, man. I'm just trying it out in public, but you get great feedback. You improve all the time. I wish I'd done more of my work in public now. Yeah.

RUPERT SHELDRAKE, DAVID BOHM, ROBERT ANTON WILSON, AND HERESY IN SCIENCE

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. Rupert Sheldrake, who I've had on the podcast, told me once that there is a huge group of scientists like himself who are basically in hiding, and he says they're in hiding because of the draconian iron fist that is the materialistic worldview – that the universe is dead, it’s a one-off. That view is in the ascendancy. And it is very difficult, given the structure of how scientists get their work or get their grants or get any of that, to suggest something different. Rupert did and paid a huge price. He was vilified publicly for his first work. The editor of Nature, the premier British scientific journal, essentially... I love this, because he didn't even know that he was owning himself, but he was on BBC back in the '70s when Rupert published his book. His name was Sir John Maddox, and he said, "I have exactly the same right to excommunicate Professor Sheldrake that the Pope did with Galileo."

Julian Gough:

I remember it. Yeah. Yes, I know. I know. Actually, you don't know this, do you? I know Rupert. Yeah. And you are right, there is this underground. I've actually worked in a little email group with him a few years ago, on consciousness in the universe, where we were trying to work out ideas about that. But yes, there was the sense that you had to almost keep it quiet that you were working on this. I mean, eventually he wrote a great paper on consciousness and the sun, which was published in a very respectable journal [The Journal of Consciousness Studies], but getting it through their peer-review process... They were scared to publish it, in a way. There's so many things you can't talk about in public. He's completely right. I really like Rupert.

I actually sent him a draft of the new thing I'm writing, about early structure formation in the universe this week, and got feedback from him, so I still really like to get his ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's been demonized. Here's a funny thing. The theory I'm working on, cosmological natural selection, the first scientist to put that out there as a coherent theory was Lee Smolin, and Lee Smolin and Rupert have talked, but Smolin doesn't want to work with Rupert because I think he's scared. I think he's scared to be seen to be talking to Rupert about the universe, and that's crazy. Lee Smolin is a great guy, but so is Rupert. You should talk to each other. It's very sad. There's a real hidden catastrophe inside science at the moment. Yeah. It's very sad.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I agree, and I liken it often... Again, Wilson is my touchstone here with his book on the return of the Inquisition in the Citadel of Science, and it dismays me no end that the scientific method suddenly became scientism, trademark, with people saying, "You may never question the science. The science is always right." That is the anathema of the scientific method. I think of David Deutsch as another who will say, the scientific method is: question everything. We can call them theories. They do sneak in “law” a couple of times, but they're not laws. They're theories, and most of them represent the best guess, estimate, for what we think the universe is, how it proceeds, how it was created, etc. But that's what they are. They're theories. And like Galileo or Copernicus, why did this happen? Why did they assume almost pope-like infallibility in their assertion that they were right and anyone questioning them was a heretic and wrong?

Julian Gough:

Well, it's been a long, slow process. Something that Galileo set up, when he basically wrote the rule book for science at the start, was that it was going to be purely mathematical. It was going to be just: the language of science is just angles and lines, and it's just going to be purely mathematical, and I'm not going to speak beyond the mathematics. And I write about this in the book I'm working on. I think he was terrified by what had happened to Bruno a few years earlier, because Bruno applied for the same job that Galileo actually got, and was turned down, and then a few years later, Bruno gets burnt. He gets taken to the Field of Flowers in Rome, an iron bolt is driven through his cheek, through his tongue, so he won't speak his heresies to the crowd. He's hung upside down naked and jeered at for a while, and then he’s set fire to. That could have been Galileo.

And that happened to Bruno partly because Bruno went beyond the data. He went beyond the data and he said, "I think I know what it means," and he spoke about the fact that, "Look at these stars in the sky. They're probably suns like our own. Those suns probably have planets like our own. Those planets probably have life like our own. There are souls on these other worlds." And that's one of the things they kill him for. So he went beyond the data and said, "What does it mean?"

And Galileo never went beyond the data. He just looked at things. "That's a shiny thing. Not going to go beyond it. It seems to be that far away. Not going to go beyond it." And that was a vow of humility. He was saying, "There are more important things and I'm going to leave them to the Church." Right? "There are more important things, and that's not my territory. I'm not going to step on anyone's toes. I'm just going to do this little mathematical science." That was a vow of humility, and what it's turned into is exactly the opposite.

Now, all of the important truths that were outside of that narrow realm, which Galileo would tell you were more important than the mathematical sciences, they are now seen as beneath the mathematical sciences. It's an extraordinary shift that the only real truth is the mathematical truths of reductionist, materialist science. All the other truths, the truths that you get through literature and through singing, through comedy, through intuition, through transcendental experience, they aren't truths at all inside of mathematical science, and it's a real transformation into the opposite of what it set out to be. What we need is a reformation. We need a reformation in science. I'm actually thinking of printing out some of the things I've come up with in the book, and I'm thinking of actually nailing them to the door of the Royal Astronomy building in Greenwich, right on the line that divides the world into time zones. I'm thinking of nailing it to the front door. I think that might get the point across. I think we need dramatic actions here, because I think the way they'd react would be delightfully papal. I think they need to get a few more little pokes, because they don't understand, they don't understand. The humility of science – because humility is at the core of science, scientists say we're humble, we are always prepared to change in the light of the evidence – but a humility that says, "this is the only possible route to truth," that's not humility anymore. So I agree with you on this. Strongly agree with you on this.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. It is, in fact, the height of arrogance. And I think one of the things, through all the rabbit holes I've dove down, that I've learned is, I don't know almost anything.

Julian Gough:

Yeah, sure. None of us do. We're mammals running around, trying to understand the universe.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

We're domesticated primates. As Robert Anton Wilson would call us, we are domesticated primates. And so, I think we need to be open to all of the various other views. Because again, as Wilson said, perceptions form opinion, opinions re-inform perceptions, and it is a tight loop that logic cannot get through to. And to see it done in the name of supposedly objective science-

Julian Gough:

I know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

... The scientific method… is just madness to me. And what's funny is, if you're familiar with the history of it, this is nothing new. Right? So David Bohm, who wrote about the implicate and explicate order-

Julian Gough:

Implicate order, yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

... Was meant to be a communist, according to the higher-ups in Washington. And they told Oppenheimer, who had been a supporter of Bob's, "No, no, no, no, no, no. He's a commie. He's a commie. You can't." And so, there are letters with Oppenheimer to his other fellow scientists saying, "We must..." It's like Mean Girls, the movie. Right? "Don't sit at our table. You can't talk to us."

Julian Gough:

I know, I know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Literally, there was a letter in which Oppenheimer said, "If we cannot disprove Bohm, we must ignore him." And this, I find it just incredibly crazy that science could become so reductionist and so deeply fearful of anything seen as uncertain. That's what the scientific method is for!

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD VERSUS HUMAN NATURE

Julian Gough:

But the scientific method is in conflict with human nature. That's why it's so powerful. It's a way of escaping our human nature, but we can't escape it, and we constantly go back into it and we're social apes. So what you end up with is social ape dynamics inside scientific fields, that can lock them off from truth over time. And that keeps happening. There's a sort of start-up energy to scientific fields, when it's just a bunch of guys, some gals, but historically, it was a lot of guys, coming up with a bunch of ideas. And there’s, like, a hundred people know about this in the whole world, and they all meet up sometimes. And that's when all the breakthroughs happen. And then, the start-ups turn into corporations, and the corporations have structures. And you end up with this kind of management bloat, and you end up with what has happened to practically every science.

They've gone from start-up energy to corporate bloat. And innovation has slowed down in every field, and it's sociological. It's a huge amount of sociology there. You need to go back to, like Paul Feyerabend, was it, who wrote Against Method, the book in the seventies, saying, "You need an anarchy of ideas. You need an anarchy of approaches…” That there isn't a scientific method, in real life. We think there is. But when you look at how the breakthroughs happen, they happen in the most extraordinarily odd, sideways, very human ways, unexpected ways down unexpected channels. They don't come through this iterative, iterative, iterative approach, where you're just expanding the horizon a little, expanding the horizon a little. Because what often happens is you've got an unexamined assumption underlying the entire field, that the field isn't structured to notice. And in fact, noticing the unexamined assumption under the field, which is wrong, is considered heretical.

And the trouble is the sociology of science; as they develop, they get cut off from the ability to fix their fundamental flaws. And that's exactly what's happened with cosmology. One of the things that's been really interesting over the last decade of studying this is, a huge part of the interest is, the science. Of course, it's the science, it's the data. But another part is the sociology. It's the extraordinary human dynamics that have basically suppressed an approach to cosmology that is far more productive and useful than their current approach. And it was suppressed for sociological reasons. You can actually trace out who kind of shot down who over a period, there was a little period of very polite warfare inside kind of physics, kind of cosmology. It was basically happening in theoretical physics, because that's where the idea that I'm playing with came from. But it was shut down by other people inside the field of theoretical physics for sociological reasons. Because the string theory guys didn't want an alternative explanation for why our universe was this complex and interesting.

They had a string theory approach. There's 500 million string theories, and with so many string theories, one of them could give you a complicated universe. They use the anthropic principle. And then, Smolin comes along and says, "I think there's this other approach using this stuff called evolutionary theory that comes out of this thing called biology that none of us fucking read. But I've actually read a bit of it. And there's this weird idea of a thing called evolution. Evolution gives you complicated things, inside a membrane, that develop over time. And our universe looks awfully like a complicated thing that develops over time inside a space-time membrane. And maybe evolution is the explanation for that."

And he came up with the pretty good basics of a theory, and it got shot down by a bunch of string theorists for completely sociological reasons. Because it was going to mess up their primacy in their theoretical physics field. And cosmology was just a kind of bystander to all of this, and it got robbed of a theoretical approach that is so powerful, an outsider like me, who doesn't have a profound knowledge of the specific domains, can make better predictions about the early universe than the mainstream. That's crazy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

It is indeed. I'm a big proponent of the power of markets. And one that shows a lot of promise, in my opinion, is, if you tie these predictions that many make, in a variety of fields – not just science – if you tie them to some sort of bet with the people who are taking the opposite side, that makes people, for whatever reason, Annie Duke is a friend of mine, and she gave me the shorthand heuristic, which is, if you want to see how much somebody really believes in something that they're saying, all you have to do is look at them and say, "Want to bet?" And she said, all of a sudden-

Julian Gough:

Yeah, how much they really believe it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

... Yeah, you can see them recalibrating right after that is said. But I also completely agree with your notion that we cannot... Ceteris paribus is – never happens – other things remaining equal. No, they're never remaining equal. And at the center of all of our endeavors sit us, we humans. You might remember the Pogo cartoon. “We've met the enemy, and it's us”. And the idea behind the sociological aspects of science, I find incredibly intriguing, simply because what you see is what you see in many other fields, a hierarchy emerges. What do people at the top of that hierarchy do? They want to remain at the top of that hierarchy. And what happens when the underlying ideas bubble up to a point where it hits a crisis mode? That's when you see the flips happening. So for example, do you know how long they tried to save Ptolemy's version of the cosmos, the Ptolemaic universe, with all of its-

Julian Gough:

Sure, epicycles.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

... Circle, its epicycles, and everything.

Julian Gough:

And then, more epicycles.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And then, Copernicus and others come along and say, "Well, wait a minute, if we just do this," and I'm gesturing and making the sun the center of the galaxy, as opposed to the earth.

Julian Gough:

Solar system.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yes. But it was also an interaction, wasn't it? Right, because we often failed to understand how much of our worldview beyond science is formed by scientific beliefs. So back to Ptolemy, right? The Ptolemaic universe was one of order and hierarchy. God sat at the top of it, and God picked the kings and the Pope. And therefore, the kings were ruling by divine right. "God told me that I was meant to be king." The popes were infallible in matters of religion, because, "God told me." And then, when Copernicus comes along, all of that, slowly, slowly starts to dissipate. People start asking, "Well, wait a minute. If we're not the center of the universe here, I wonder what else is wrong?"

Julian Gough:

Yeah, it's very destabilizing. The changes in how we see the universe are very destabilizing in how we see ourselves and our political structures. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

THE UNAVOIDABLE PROBLEM OF AXIOMS, DOGMAS, AND UNEXAMINED ASSUMPTIONS

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Absolutely. And the challenge is, I'm also a fan of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, who wrote about this extensively. If you haven't read his very short piece, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, I recommend it, because it plays into Agrippa's trilemma or Münchausen trilemma, which says that, essentially, logic has three problems that you cannot surmount. The first is, it's often circular. And the second is, and this is where Dodgson or Carroll comes in, it goes into an infinite regress. Because each time you get to ask the question, "Well, if A implies B and you say B implies C, does that mean C implies D?" Well, yes, it does. And then, you keep going and going and going, and then, you finally get to the one that I'm really interested in, which is the planted axiom in all logical systems, which creates dogma. And that planted axiom is this, according to Carroll, when you get all the way down in a logical system, what are you going to find? You are going to find a base rule, an axiom, that a human simply asserted was true.

Julian Gough:

Yeah, of course.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

With no proof. With no proof, right? And so, again, to our mutually admired Wilson, the wrong software guarantees the wrong answer, right?

Julian Gough:

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

If you keep feeding things into the wrong software, it's going to keep spitting back the same answer.

Julian Gough:

But that's what's happened with cosmology – cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics. The unexamined assumption there, which goes back to Newton, whatever, it goes back to Galileo, there's this unexamined assumption that the universe, well, that our universe is a one-shot universe, that the matter in it is just random matter obeying arbitrary laws that just happen to be these laws and there happens to be this matter and it happened to happen once, and it's just... Right? And if you make that assumption, you end up just trying to treat the entire universe as though you can just essentially use simple gas laws to work out what's going to happen next. And that's not how the universe behaves at all. It doesn't seem to obey simple gas laws. It's not all spread out evenly everywhere. It has all sorts of complex structure that we didn't anticipate at all until like 1978. It's the seventies. Punk was already past its bloom when we discovered that the structure of the universe is nothing like what we predicted.

Because that's the first time we got 3D maps of the universe. It's the first time we actually did a proper redshift survey of how fast galaxies were getting away from us, and we realized, "Holy crap, there's huge voids between these galaxies, and there's these huge structures." 80% of the universe has nothing in it, essentially nothing in it. It's like 80% of the universe, the average density in those parts is like less than 10% of the average density of the universe. They're very empty of stars and galaxies. Most of the matter in the universe is gathered in just these nodes, these clusters and super clusters of galaxies, which are connected by filaments – but the nodes only take up about 1%, one or 2%, of the volume of the whole universe. The other 18, 20% is filaments that join the nodes, going between these huge voids that have almost nothing in them, and the filaments are full of gas and some galaxies, some stars.

But that is a crazy structure that was not anticipated at all. And in 1978, we discovered this, oh! Up until that point, they were assuming that the galaxies were all spread out, analogous to just random molecules of gas obeying simple gas laws. That's a big mistake. And there's no humility when they realize, "Oh, we have been completely wrong about the structure of the universe." What they do is, they try to get it back to simplicity by just throwing more matter at it. And you end up using dark matter to solve every problem. But to solve the problem, you have to throw more and more dark matter at it, and then, you have to give it quirky little attributes that work in this situation, but not in that situation. But you don't synthesize the two and say, "Well, then it can't exist."

Instead you say, "Well, maybe it's like this, because that solves this problem. No, maybe it's like this, that solves this problem." And you have this completely incoherent response. After 50 years of dark matter, we still haven't seen any. We have no detections. And we still don't even know what kind of stuff it is. Is it axions? Is it sterile neutrinos? Is it an unknown particle of some kind? It gets less defined over 50 years of investigation, rather than more, which is exactly the opposite of what should happen in real science. In real science, you should say, "We've made a fundamental error here that's underlying all our assumptions. We need to go back down to that fundamental error and fix that." But they can't. They're stuck inside a paradigm that's based on assumptions that just aren't true, the idea that we're in a random one-shot universe, where matter just obeys arbitrary laws.

But they're not. Everything's fine tuned. You can't go from a hot ball of gas that doesn't even have the elements in it yet, they haven't even been formed yet, just hydrogen essentially, to you and me talking to each other, through advanced technologies, in abstract language. And while we're doing this, we're doing it inside a biosphere that sustains itself as a homeostatic, dynamic, out-of-equilibrium system for billions of years, with an external energy source, which is also a homeostatic, dynamic, out-of-equilibrium system that maintains itself for billions of years with an incredibly frugal output of power.

People say about hydrogen fusion, "Oh, it gives out so much energy!” Yeah, there's so much energy from each individual fusion incident, but the rate at which stars do it is incredibly frugal. It buys you the time for life to develop and evolve and so forth. Everything – the fact that the molecules that make up you and me exist – is down to multiple rounds of star formation, building out the elements, then distributing them, when the stars get to the end of their lives, as supernova explosions, to make the next round of stars, which will fuse the next round of elements, which will then explode out into the surrounding gas, to make the next round, so that, after three rounds of star formation, you can build planets.

This is an unbelievably sophisticated developmental process that leads to where we are now. And the idea that random gas happens to bump into itself under arbitrary laws and it ended up doing this by mistake is so fucking stupid. And to not even see that there's a problem here, that needs to be explained, it blows my mind. Like, "You don't think there's a problem here?" Because every time an astronomer looks down a telescope, they look through the telescope and they say, "I can just see random gas. It happens to interact in strange ways." But they're not looking down the other end of the telescope! There's an astronomer there, in an institution, built out of technology, using all these elements that were somehow assembled by that random gas. You've got to look down both ends of the telescope.

And I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by where we've ended up with cosmology and astrophysics and astronomy, where you can't say it means anything, because they're terrified. If you say, "This obviously means something, this self-complexification, and it needs an explanation," if you say that, they're terrified what you mean is, "And the explanation is God." And they're so scared of God, because the origins of science were so scared of God and scared of the church and everything else, that they're still scared. And the funniest thing is, the answer isn't God. The answer is evolution. So what you've got are people rejecting evidence of evolution, because they're terrified it's evidence of God. It's the most ironic, paradoxical situation. I just love it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

As do I. And you've set the table nicely for our listeners and viewers for a fuller explanation of the cosmological natural selection theory. I'm familiar with it from Lee Smolin's work in the nineties, I think, when he came up with that. But as you point out, I also want to just make an aside, what you were talking about, "Oh, the answer's dark matter," it sounds a lot like throwing more epicycles into the Ptolemaic universal model, doesn't it? Right?

Julian Gough:

Yes! And the thing is, you can do great with enough epicycles. You can do great, but it's just not true. That's the problem; it's just not true. And you can sort of make dark matter do a lot of interesting things, if you invent enough of it, and place it exactly where you want. But if you look at the simulations that they use to do this, to play out how you get structure in the universe, there's 9 or 10 free parameters that you can adjust. With that many free parameters, you can make anything happen, anything. It's CGI, you know? Marvel can do this too. They can give you a very convincing universe using computers and enough free parameters. It doesn't mean it's true.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I love that.

Julian Gough:

It's crazy.

THE CURRENT, REMARKABLY HEALTHY, STATE OF COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

But now, let's take a step back, because you extend Smolin's work by making predictions, by doing a lot of things that he didn't do with that theory, but if you would...

Julian Gough:

And there's good reasons why he didn't. There's been more data since. He just couldn't have come up with some of the conclusions I came to, because we didn't know enough at the time. But yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Exactly. And we didn't have the James Webb and all of that, but let's give a layman's definition of the theory of cosmological natural selection. And then, I'm going to go into some of the specific, talk about brave, some of the specific predictions that you made. And there's a really exciting one, but I'm not going to do a spoiler before you tell our listeners about the theory itself.

Julian Gough:

Well, I think it's worth going all the way back. I think there's always been an intuition that something like this might be true, that the universe might have evolved. You see David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, intuiting that perhaps there were many labors, and many worlds lost, before this world came into being. He's talking about this kind of thing, but in a pre-Darwinian world. So there's no mechanism for this to happen. He's just saying, "It seems strange that we ended up with this complex world. Were there earlier failed worlds?" And then, Darwin comes along, and he comes up with a theory of evolution, but he comes up with a theory of evolution for DNA organisms, for biological organisms. He comes up with it at a time when the assumption is that the universe is infinite and eternal. The basic scientific assumption is the universe is infinite and eternal.

That's why it's called the universe! There's only one of it. And so, that assumption means everything happens inside this one eternal, infinite universe. Charles Peirce, after Darwin, the great American pragmatist philosopher, thinks, "Wait a minute, this is interesting, because natural laws are very odd things that probably need an explanation. And evolution seems like the natural explanation for something that seems fine-tuned, that seems to be precise, that seems to have consequences that are complex and interesting." So Charles Peirce was the first guy to say, "Wow, maybe there's an evolutionary theory behind the physical laws of nature." But he didn't know where to place the evolution, because he was still living inside an infinite and eternal universe. But he thought, "Maybe they somehow evolved inside this universe."

You get into the 20th century, and suddenly, we had this weird moment. It wasn't a moment. It was dragged out over a long time, that it took us a long time to work out this was the case. But you end up with this transition from the infinite, eternal universe, which we've always assumed to be the case under science, to the discovery of the Big Bang. And it's a slow burn, because they discovered the galaxies are flying apart, Hubble discovers that, and that's really freaky. Then they realize the implications of that are, they're flying apart from a point, from somewhere. Then we start looking for evidence of that.

Then we eventually discover the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, in the sixties. And we realized, "Holy crap, we can hear the Big Bang. There was a moment of creation. There's a moment of generation for this particular universe. This universe isn't infinite, and it isn't eternal. It started at a specific point, and it expanded from that. And you've got the speed of light constraining everything. So it's only a certain size, and it's only a certain age. And now, we think it's 13.8 billion years, and it's as big as it could expand in that time."

But that's just a bubble of space-time. It's not infinite. It's not eternal. That should have really made cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, they should have all gone back to their absolute basic foundational beliefs at that point, and examined them again. And they didn't. They didn't. So what you've got now is a cognitive dissonance in those sciences, where they're kind of assuming, in some ways, that everything's infinite, eternal, but you've got this new piece of information. The universe started at a point and grew, developed rapidly, developed rapidly. We used to think we had an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of time for something complicated to happen. Fair enough, in an infinite amount of time, something complicated will probably eventually happen. We don't have that luxury anymore. We've only got 13.8 billion years, which is not very long.

And the person I think that made the big breakthrough in thinking about how you could square these various circles, this very complex universe we live in, which is very recent, was Lee Smolin. Lee Smolin was a... No, I'll actually go back to a mentor of his, John Wheeler. John Wheeler, at this point, realized, John Wheeler is a great American physicist, he realized there's two problems that we haven't solved yet in our universe that involves singularities. A singularity is a point of infinite density, where mass energy just gets crushed down to a point of infinite density, right? And weird shit happens at that point.

None of our rules work at that point. When you get down to a singularity, general relativity doesn't apply anymore. We can't do a quantum mechanical explanation. Literally none of our theories operate at that point. So we don't know what happens. And there's two of those in our universe now. One, black holes. When stars get to the end of their lives, they burn out their fuel. There's no longer radiation pressure to keep them expanded. So they collapse under gravity. And if they're big enough, they keep on collapsing to the point where they form a singularity. They're a black hole.

That mass energy vanishes from the universe, and we don't know where it goes. We don't know what happens. Information can't come back from a black hole. Mass energy has gone, that's a singularity.

The Big Bang is the other singularity. In the Big Bang, from a singularity, mass energy expands to form our space-time. And John Wheeler was the first person to say, "What if they're the same thing looked at from different sides? What if the collapse of mass energy to a point, that is a black hole in a parent universe, bounces to form the singularity that mass energy expands out of to form a baby universe? What if universes give birth to universes through black holes and Big Bangs?" Because remember, the Big Bang, the new baby universe, is outside the parent universe. It's not inside it. It's gone. So I think that was one of the great obvious, brilliant insights, but he didn't know what to do with it.

He said, "Maybe the child universe is randomly different from the parent universe, and maybe if there's enough random differences, you'll end up with a complicated universe like ours." Okay. It's not a great explanation, but he's groping towards something. But one of his students or one of the students influenced by him was Lee Smolin, a very good theoretical physicist. And Lee Smolin realized, because he was reading a lot of evolutionary theory on the side, that, if, instead of being randomly different, the child universe was only slightly different, then the basic parameters of matter, if they were slightly different in the child universe, that child universe would, as a result of that, be likely to either create more black holes or less black holes; be more reproductively successful or less reproductively successful. And, if that's the case, you get Darwinian evolution automatically, because you've got inheritance with variation. And so the child universes whose basic parameters of matter produce more black holes will have more offspring. That evolutionary line of the basic parameters of matter will be varied on again in the next generation. Some of those offspring will produce more, some will produce less… And you should get runaway reproductive success of universes, because universes aren't like biological organisms. They're not in conflict in a narrow constrained environment where there's only a limited amount of food or anything. You're generating a whole new space-time from scratch each time.

That's one of the really interesting things about our universe, which gives you, let's say, a clue towards the fact this might be an evolved thing. Our universe is essentially flat. The mass energy and the gravitational energy balance out to zero. You could make this universe for nothing, right? And if that's the case, universes can produce huge numbers of offspring for free.

And this isn't controversial. We know that we can pretty much make universes out of nothing, that they balance out to nothing. So you've got this ability to make very productive, fecund universes. And our universe produces… well, so far, it's probably produced something like 40 quintillion black holes. That's the latest survey, they think that we've probably got about 40 quintillion. So there's a lot. We produced a lot of black holes.

And that was kind of Smolin's idea, that you would basically get the basic parameters of matter fine-tuned to produce more and more black holes. And if that required more complex structures over time, you'd get more complex structures that were better at and more efficient at producing black holes. And it's a great theory. And I am really upset that it wasn't taken more seriously at the time and given more of the community's attention and budget.

But what happened was, sociologically, he was in trouble, because he published his first paper, Did the Universe Evolve?, in the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity. Who reads the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity? Like, a hundred guys, and all they're interested in is quantum gravity, right? That's it. So nobody who could do anything with it, read it.

So a few years later, he writes a book about it, The Life of the Cosmos. And I've been rereading it, and I used to be harder on it. It's actually a lovely, lovely book. But he hangs off telling you the really exciting, interesting part for about 150 pages, because I think he's scared to tell you. I think he's scared. It's like, it's too big and it's too weird, and he's not sure, and so on and so on.

And the book didn't really take off. And it was before the internet, so when he published that paper, that journal didn't go online for another six years, so nobody could stumble on it. It was on a hundred print copies in a hundred libraries in the Quantum Gravity section. You're not going to find it by mistake.

All the people that could have done something with it, they didn't even know about it. And then, when the book comes out, Leonard Susskind, the main String Theorist, King String, really tried to put it down. There's an online debate between Susskind and Smolin, on The Edge website. It's still up there.

And you can see them arguing back and forth about cosmological natural selection. And Susskind uses arguments against the theory that are completely wrong – but nobody notices, because they're all theorists. They're all physicists. His basic argument against Smolin was, if universes evolved to optimize for black hole production, they would produce the most black holes you could possibly produce. That's a mathematician's idea, right, of how evolution works.

So his argument is, “I can imagine a universe that produces loads more black holes, that's just nothing but little tiny black holes. And this isn't that, so this isn't evidence of optimization for black hole production.”

Now translate this into terms we're more familiar with, and you can see how stupid this argument is. It's like saying, "Giraffes can't have evolved, because giraffes only have one or two offspring a year. I can imagine giraffes that produce billions of offspring every second. So clearly giraffes were not optimized by evolution for reproductive success."

That's a theoretical physicist's idea of an argument, right? Because in real life, you have to have a direct evolutionary line from the beginning, to the universe you're observing. And all of the way along that line, all the intervening universes have to be reproductively successful, right?

If you can give me the evolutionary line from an ultimately primitive beginning that is not that reproductively successful at all, to trillions of black holes in every cubic meter, then I'll grant your point. But you can't fucking do it, can you?

So the problem was, nobody took this seriously as a genuinely evolutionary theory. And the theory then got expanded a little. One of the glories of this theory is it does explain the fine-tuning of the basic parameters of matter, because we've got a very fine-tuned universe here. If you change many of the parameters – the parameters would be things like the mass of the electron, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and so on.

If you change them by very much, you do not get complex structure. You don't even get atoms. You just get mush. And with any randomly-chosen set of parameters, you're nearly always going to get mush. The fact that we don't get mush, the fact that we get self-complexification at all scales, really needs explanation. And evolution gives you an explanation. Evolution will give you a fine-tuned set of parameters that gives you a giraffe or a complicated universe, from a bunch of sludge, if you give it enough generations.

So that was great. The theory wasn't there yet though. I mean, do you want to interrupt at this point and ask any questions or anything? Are we good? Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Keep going.

Julian Gough:

Okay.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

You're on a roll.

Julian Gough:

There was some development of the theory by people who thought, there's really something here. And the next breakthrough in the theory, which I find very interesting – and this is the bit where some people think this is too speculative, it's too science fictional, but I don't think it is, I think this is just logical – was by people like Clément Vidal. He's a very good Belgian philosopher of science, and he's worked on astrobiology, and the search for alien life, and stuff. Good guy. And John Smart, very interesting futurist and thinker. And Louis Crane, he's an excellent mathematician in Kansas. A few people worked on this theory. But you have to explain life. Why would you have life in a complex, evolved universe? Because the thing that's reproducing, the unit of selection, is the universe, right? So why would intelligent life be useful to a universe? And there's actually an answer to that, right?

In this universe, and I've worked a little bit with some of the guys on this, the intelligent lifeforms start to manipulate other matter, make technologies, and so on, and they want to optimize their energy sources, as everything does. As a cat does, a cat optimizes its energy sources. A fish, a bacterium, they all optimize their energy so that they don't die, so they can get the most chance to live and reproduce with the amount of energy that's available. And they'll tap whatever sources of energy they can.

Humans, and other intelligent life forms on other worlds, can tap, as David Deutsch would say, anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. Eventually, we're going to tap anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. And what are the limits of that in our universe? What's the ultimate form of energy release in our universe that's realistically tap-able inside the laws of physics? It's black holes.

If you can artificially make small black holes, you can use them to convert up to 42% of the mass of a piece of matter into energy, 42%. That's an incredible rate of return.

Fusion in the sun, fusion reactions only give you 0.7% of the mass back as energy. Fission, primitive nuclear bombs, fission will only give you 0.1% of the mass back as energy. So 42 percent's unreal. And any technologically advanced civilization is eventually probably going to technologically produce small black holes for energy production, because that's the best you're going to get.

And any universe that is accidentally, blindly exploring the possibility space for matter, if it ends up generating intelligent life that's able to manipulate technology, it will end up producing colossal numbers of small black holes, that couldn't have been produced by natural processes previous to life. So you'll have lots of stellar mass black holes – stars will still die and form black holes – but you'll also get far more technologically-produced black holes, which means far more efficient reproductive success.

It's going to be hugely conserved by evolution, if it ever happens, even once. So that's why you've got intelligent life. It makes sense from the point of view of the universe, which is the unit of selection. It will heavily select for that.

Okay, that's great. You need one more breakthrough for this theory to really kick off. And it didn't happen at the time, because we didn't know enough about supermassive black holes. And this is my contribution, I think, to the theory. Okay?

There's a supermassive black hole at the core of every galaxy. We've got very, very roughly a trillion galaxies in our universe. And every one of them that we've looked at in any detail seems to have a supermassive black hole at its core. Now, a supermassive black hole is really big. They range in size, but they're supermassive, they're really big.

Some of them are millions of times the mass of our sun. Some of them are billions of times the mass of our sun. The existing set of theories on how you get those supermassive black holes, how they came about, tended to just involve lots of small black holes in a trench coat, lots of stellar mass black holes in a trench coat. You get a lot of stellar mass black holes early enough, and maybe they'd merge, and then more of them would merge, and then more of them would merge. And they end up, somehow they're billions of suns. Okay, great.

My contribution to the theory was to rethink the whole process from first principles. If the theory was true, what are the implications from first principles? And this is what I did when I knew the James Webb Space Telescope was going to come online. The James Webb was going to show us the first billion years, which we'd never seen before.

Because I realized that, if you've got supermassive black holes in our universe, they are probably conserved from an earlier era of universes. Because, imagine the earliest, most primitive universes, where you didn't have complex matter, you didn't have ninety-something stable elements. You didn't have you and me talking to each other. You didn't even have stars. You didn't have galaxies. You didn't have complex systems for producing black holes. You just had big bangs and black holes. Just as with biological life, the earliest life forms were prokaryotic bacteria. All they did was reproduce.

They would split into whatever, they'd reproduce, and they didn't do much else. They didn't do complicated structures. They didn't even have a nucleus, right? They were just primitive reproducers. You're going to have to have something similar, if this theory is true, in the evolutionary history of the universe. Go back far enough, and all they're doing are big bang, black hole, big bang, black hole. It's just the earliest, most primitive matter, flip-flopping between big bang, and black hole.

If you eventually get one that produces two black holes, big bang, two black holes, great, now you've got Darwinian Evolution, and off we go, right. But they are producing – by direct collapse, no intervening stars or anything complicated, no technology, no life – direct collapse supermassive black holes. All they're doing is splitting into several parts that collapse. That's all they're doing. That is direct collapse supermassive black hole production.

If we have supermassive black holes in our universe, then evolution will not have invented a whole new complicated way of making them. It will have conserved the original way of making them, which was direct collapse (no intervening, bunch of stars or galaxies needed) supermassive black holes.

So my prediction then was, based on that insight – which I really can't believe didn't occur to anybody else, but I've never found anyone else it occurred to – was okay, that means that all the supermassive black holes in our universe must've been produced by direct collapse. When were they produced by direct collapse? Well, they weren't produced recently by direct collapse, because we'd bloody see, it's an amazing thing for billions or millions of stars-worth of gas just collapse in one go, without forming stars on the way. It's a very difficult thing to do. What are the conditions under which you can do that?

You can only do that if the gas is smooth enough. If it's not smooth, if there's little density fluctuations in it, denser parts, as it collapses, those denser parts will collapse into and form stars, right? That's how stars form. Little dense pockets collapse to form stars.

But if it's smooth enough, you can collapse smoothly, past the point where you would get localized nucleation into little stars. The whole area can collapse and form, by direct collapse, a supermassive black hole. Interestingly enough, the mathematics on that had already been done about 18 years ago by Priya Natarajan of Yale Astronomy Department. And a few other people, I think, both Volker Bromm and even Avi Loeb, a few heavy hitters, were involved in realizing that you could actually technically, in our universe, get, by direct collapse, supermassive black holes.

But it was a theoretical oddity. Nobody expected to find lots of them. It was just, under very difficult, very precise conditions, it might be possible. My prediction was, the conditions that allow for that are going to be the conditions right after the Big Bang when everything's really smooth. We know it's smooth from the cosmic microwave background radiation, unbelievably smooth gas in the early universe, which is a problem for star formation in the current set of theories, because you can't nucleate out stars when it's that smooth, right? But you can do direct collapse supermassive black holes.

So I predicted, what you're going to see, what the James Webb will ultimately see when it sees back far enough, is a huge wave, very early on, in the first 50 million years, a hundred million years, definitely inside the first hundred million, probably almost certainly inside the first 50 million, you're going to get a wave of direct collapse supermassive black holes, a trillion of them. The number you see in our current universe, they all form then.

And they are then going to generate the conditions for star formation. Conditions are optimized for supermassive black hole formation, and that's been conserved by evolution. But they then generate the conditions for star formation. And I've expanded a bit since, I'm writing some stuff that you haven't even seen yet, on structure formation, it comes out of the supermassive black holes.

So as they form, the gas falls in. It's ionized, so it's turbulent, it falls closer. You get a blazing hot doughnut of gas called an accretion disk around the supermassive black hole. And those generate, then, intense magnetic fields. They're dynamos, incredibly powerful dynamos. And they generate jets of charged particles that go north and south out of the magnetic poles. And they shock the surrounding gas, and those shock waves nucleate out star formation.

So I predicted, what you should see is very rapid, very early, very compact galaxy formation in the very early universe. Not the bottom up model, which is slow: a star here, a star there, a few stars drift together, some more stars clump, drift together, till eventually the clumps clump, blah, blah, blah. And you get, eventually, something a bit like a primitive galaxy. And eventually, some of the black holes merge to form a bigger black hole…

That's not what you're going to see. You're going to see early, rapid, galaxy formation dominated by supermassive black holes.

And that's what they're seeing. That's what the James Webb eventually, when it started sending back data, started to see. It's seeing galaxies forming compact, early, rapidly – dominated by supermassive black holes. And I don't think anybody else predicted that. I have not been able to find anyone else who predicted precisely that, but that's what we're seeing. Okay?

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And so, for my much more simple-minded approach to this, we get these supermassive black holes, which in turn give birth to galaxies. Right?

Julian Gough:

They generate the galaxies around themselves. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Around themselves, right. And that gives us stellar mass, yeah? That's what creates the stars?

Julian Gough:

And the stars then... Yes. And then the stars, as they get to the end of the life, collapse to make stellar mass black holes. So you can see how that would've been a reproductively successful breakthrough along the history of universes.

Let's leave life out of it for a while. Yeah, great, let's do this. Let's explore it this way. There would've been early primitive universes that just did direct collapse supermassive black holes. Some of them would've left some matter over. That matter would've explored the possibility space, as lots of different child universes had different variations in those basic parameters of matter. Some of them made slightly more complicated atoms and molecules. They're all just made out of protons and electrons. It's all very simple building blocks, but they built up more complex structures. And you would've had supermassive black holes where they left over some matter.

And that matter was able to form stars that formed stellar mass black holes. A lot more stellar mass black holes than supermassive black holes. So that's a big revolutionary breakthrough in the evolutionary history of universes; more reproductive success. They explore the possibility space. They get more efficient at making stars smaller, therefore making more stellar mass black holes, star-sized black holes.

Interestingly, one of the things that you have in stars that makes them so efficient, and you can therefore make smaller ones and they can build out more matter, and so on, is carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen form the CNO cycle, which is a fusion cycle inside stars. It makes stars fuse more efficiently, blah, blah, blah. Carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are then the building blocks for the next evolutionary breakthrough, which is life. And then technologically-made black holes. But you can see what's happening here.

You have a process that we're very familiar with in biological evolution, which is exaptation. Exaptation is when you take something that was developed to do one job by evolution, and you adapt it to do a completely different job. And it performs a function that couldn't have evolved from scratch. It's just too big a jump, but it doesn't have to jump, because it's building on something complex that was already there.

The classic example in biology is swim bladders. Swim bladders are the air sacs in fish that help them go up and down, keep their buoyancy, keep their level in the water. The air goes in, air goes out, and they stay at the height they want to in the water, because otherwise, they have to swim very hard. So a swim bladder full of air helps the fish do that. Swim bladders were what was exapted to make lungs when the first amphibious fish went up onto land.

They didn't invent lungs from scratch, they exapted, they adapted, in evolutionary terms, the swim bladders to form the lung, the basis for the lungs. Likewise, the CNO cycle in stars – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen – they evolved to help make stars better at making little star black holes, star-sized black holes.

But the next breakthrough came on top of that, using carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, as the basics for biological life, which led to this next breakthrough. You don't have to invent life from scratch – which would be a hell of a breakthrough. You can build on the previous complexification, the previous more complex structures that were developed.

My version of cosmological natural selection is a kind of a three-stage version. I'm saying, our universe has three rounds of reproductive success. Each of them is an evolutionary breakthrough that happened at a different era. Each has been conserved, because it's built on by the next one. So in our universe, you see supermassive black holes. They evolve first in the history of universes, but we still have them. They come first. In the development of our specific universe, they generate the conditions for star formation and galaxy formation, and thus stellar mass black holes, star-sized black holes, of which there are hundreds of millions more than there are supermassive black holes, because there's hundreds of millions of stars in the average galaxy, which only has one supermassive black hole and hundreds of millions of stars.

And then, stars build out the periodic table and distribute it so that you can have planets, so that you can have life, so you can have technology, so that you can have us. And we will ultimately generate a hell of a lot more, many orders of magnitude more, very small back holes, and be even more reproductively successful for the universe that we're part of.

And I'm saying that the developmental process you see in our universe mirrors the evolutionary process that led to this specific universe. Does that make sense?

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

It does. And it would also posit, if I'm correct in my interpretation of your theory-

Julian Gough:

Sure.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

It would also posit, literally trillions of exoplanets which contain life, right?

Julian Gough:

Yeah. I'm predicting very, very large amounts of life in this universe, ultimately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not finished yet! We're undergoing a developmental process. Another implication of the theory is that probably, it's likely that most of the life on... Yeah, most of the life in our universe is probably more likely to be on icy moons with liquid water oceans, than it is on exposed rocky surfaces like Earth.

Because if you look at our solar system, and assume it's relatively normal, relatively normal, you look for the liquid water. Where's the liquid water? Because life is going to need liquid water more than it needs anything else. Liquid water seems to be the most necessary chemical.

There's liquid water on the surface of the earth. Great. But the vast majority of liquid water in our solar system is under the crusts of icy moons. And the mechanism by which that water stays liquid isn't the same as the mechanism that keeps the water liquid on earth, right?

Icy moons go around big planets like Jupiter and Saturn, and as they're going around them, their orbits are usually a little bit eccentric. That means they go a bit further out at this point, a bit closer at this point. If you have an eccentric orbit, and you're going around a really big planet like Jupiter or Saturn, there's a lot of tug on the core of that moon. The planet tugs on the moon every time it goes closer and further away, it's tugged gravitationally. And that melts, that friction, that gravitational friction, melts the core of these icy moons, keeps them molten, and liquefies a lot of the ice.

A lot of these moons, you look at them… on the surface, you think, "Jesus Christ, that's frozen," because it is. The sun isn't doing jack. The sun is very, very, very, very dim in the sky if you're a moon of Saturn. But, under 10, 20, 30, 40 miles of ice, you then get to a liquid water ocean that gets warmer and warmer the further, the closer to the core you get, and that has nutrients coming up into it from the molten rocky core.

So it's got the nutrients for life coming up. It's got a massive liquid water ocean. It's protected by an incredibly thick shell of ice, that's like... Well, ice at that temperature is like steel, it's harder than steel. And there's lots of these moons. Even weirder, we discovered in the last year, by looking at a star-making region very close to us, the Orion Nebula, that, in star formation regions where stars are forming, there's also a lot of Jupiter-sized planets forming on their own, with no stars. And if those Jupiter-sized planets have moons, icy moons, they'll have liquid water oceans because of the gravitational friction involved in going around the Jupiter-sized planet. They don't need a star.

So most life in the universe might not even need a star. All the liquid water is on the icy moons! Europa's a small moon. It's got twice as much liquid water as earth. And if you look at the rocky planets on earth, Mercury has been boiled to death. It's got liquid lead puddles. It's a horrendous environment. Venus got cooked by greenhouse gases, and it's raining sulfuric acid. Earth is doing fine, kind of. We nearly got wiped out by asteroids that killed the dinosaurs. And we did turn into a snowball twice, and we have had some problems, but we're still hanging in there. We're doing pretty good.

Mars, oh no, the oceans have evaporated and its entire atmosphere has blown away. There's only one out of four have been able to hold onto life, of the four rocky planets, and have been able to hold onto liquid water. All of the icy moons are hanging onto their liquid water. It's a much more efficient way of producing liquid water oceans, and the conditions for life.

So maybe rocky planets with liquid water surfaces were an earlier, more successful way of generating life. But it looks to me like evolution is optimizing for liquid water oceans on icy moons.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And that brings us right back to the well-known Fermi paradox, right?

Julian Gough:

Yes, yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Which is, for those who don't know, and I would guess that virtually all of our listeners and viewers know about the Fermi paradox, but if you don't, it's like, "Okay, if this is all true, where is everybody? How come we're not seeing anything?" Which also leads to our good friend Nick Bostrom, with his Great Filter Theory.

Basically, I remember reading it for the first time, and I think he opens, if memory serves, he opens with, "I am praying we find no life on Mars." And I'm like, "What? What? What? What are you going on about here, Nick?" And then he makes the point, that he posits that any advanced technological civilization would have to make it past what he termed The Great Filter, right? The Great Filter is usually a cataclysmic event, which wipes life out, sometimes caused by meteors, sometimes caused by that intelligent life itself, blowing themselves up, all of those things. So where does Nick and Fermi, where do they figure into this theory?

Julian Gough:

It's a really good question, because I am predicting lots of life in this universe. So where is it? I think this, what I've just described to you, gives a possible answer to that, right? This is an interesting one. If most life is, in fact, in the liquid water oceans of icy moons, imagine what their view of the universe is. They're under a hundred miles of steel-hard ice. They develop a civilization. They have no idea they're in a universe. They don't know why the center is warm and the surface is cold. They don't know it's a surface! It's just, that's the end. They don't have stars in the sky. They don't see a sun, they can't see planets. Would they ever dig up through the ice a hundred miles and then fall into space? I don't know what the logic or the psychology of any kind of civilization that develops under those conditions is. I can't see space-faring civilizations coming out of that. I don't know. They may never leave. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I do. I do. I do.

Julian Gough:

We're stuck on the surface. We being hit by rocks. We're very aware that we're in space. They're not. They're not. And the other factor is the chemistry is just colder. It's going to take longer for life to evolve. So life could be germinating away, but it hasn't reached the intelligent technology-wielding stage on a huge number of icy moons, and in a huge number of galaxies. I don't know. I don't. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

As I listen to that though, I'm reminded of Plato's allegory of the cave. What you're basically saying is that the life that could be underneath those hundred miles of ice are like the people in the allegory of the cave in many respects. I'm calling them people. God knows what they are, but sentient beings, let's put it that way. That the sentient beings in these environments where they have no stars, they have no rocks hitting them. They're under a hundred miles of ice. They're essentially not going to ever get the idea, "Hey, do you think we should kind of drill?"

Julian Gough:

Keep digging?

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, keep digging.

Julian Gough:

The trouble is that they're digging up. It's harder for them. The natural direction for them to dig is down, to work with gravity, but that's towards the rocky core, that's towards the molten core.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

They could, I'm sure.

Julian Gough:

I'm not saying they're not going to do it. I'm just trying to work out what's the logic. It's going to be of such a different reality. I don't know how they're going to navigate it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

What's intriguing-

Julian Gough:

I also don't know how the hell they do space travel, given that they have to bring liquid water with them. They live in liquid water. A lot of mass. If they're using small black holes as energy sources… this is another thing, small black holes anchor you like nothing else. If your major energy source is a small black hole, you ain't accelerating anywhere. Your power source has the mass of Mount Everest, you're not accelerating it. So it really slows down space travel. You have to use different, less efficient forms of energy to do actual space travel. Your most efficient energy source is not acceleratable.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

But wouldn't this also imply that those of us who happen to be lucky enough to live on a rock that has access to seeing the stars, to seeing the galaxies, to seeing all that, wouldn't that give us an unusual advantage over life forms stuck under-

Julian Gough:

We're early and lucky. Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. So what would that imply about, because the third type of black hole that you infer is those that are created by technology. And would you, under the theory that you're developing, would you expect to see an anomalous enough black hole through James Webb, for example, that could be, wow, that looks like it was not created naturally?

Julian Gough:

If we saw a lot of little ones, yeah. Can you see a lot of little ones? Are they big enough to do any kind of gravitational lensing effect that you would be able to pick up on? If it's an Everest sized black hole, it's really not bending that many photons. It's small. Louis Crane has done some work on what's the optimum size for small black holes if you were technologically producing them. And they're pretty small. They're kind of a Mount Everest sized mass shrunk to something ludicrously tiny. It's just hard to see an effect that would be detectable at the moment. That's not to say it's not possible. I mean, down the line technology gets better and better, but I don't know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I wonder too, because we haven't even touched on where consciousness enters.

Julian Gough:

That's a big one.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And that's been an obsession of mine for decades.

Julian Gough:

I think I'm going to have to do that in a second book, because that complicates everything so much. What I'm doing with The Egg and the Rock is, I am laying out an explanation, inside all the rules of contemporary science, for the material reality we experience. And I'm just explaining material reality; a self-complexifying universe that seems to develop upward into complexity over time, that ekes out its energy so as to do that, that channels its energy, so as to do that, to get to living creatures, and that contains supermassive black holes, and stellar mass black holes, and intelligent life. And I'm trying to explain all those things sheerly in terms of material reality, with no extra physics, there's no additional physics, no additional particles, nothing… and that's enough for one book.

Once you bring in consciousness, it becomes an unbelievably different book. And I would happily write that one, after I've written this one. I think it will put off too many people if I bring in consciousness now. But you are completely right that the implications are colossal.

We know consciousness is part of this universe. If this universe evolved from a line of other universes, there are also other evolutionary lines that may be far more advanced than us. We don't know if our universe is a gazelle or a whale or an amoeba or a bacterium. It could be a prokaryotic bacterium. We don't know. We are on an evolutionary line, but there could be universes far more complex than ours. And if consciousness is part of being a universe, imagine what their consciousness is like.

But can universes in any way… well, this brings in the horrible problem of, can universes communicate with each other? Can conscious universes somehow communicate with other universes? Do conscious universes care about other universes? I don't know, but that's a whole other book, and it's too big for this book. I totally agree with you though, that these are fascinating questions. Fascinating questions. I've had my own transcendental experiences, and I have my own theories on this, but that's not the book I'm writing this year, but yeah. What are your thoughts? Throw in some, what do you think?

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, I'm-

Julian Gough:

The relationship between consciousness, and matter, and consciousness in the universe, is so profound and again, so badly explored by science.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

You've just summarized my view, the idea that they're trying to set consciousness aside, calling it the hard problem, right?

Julian Gough:

Yeah.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, yeah, it's a hard problem, but you can't simply set aside consciousness because virtually what we are doing right now is predicated on the fact that we are conscious. We have no workable definition that is even been proposed around consciousness

Julian Gough:

It's fascinating. Yeah. We're lost.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And so I am absolutely enamored of it and have been trying to figure it out. Talk about a rabbit hole, man.

Julian Gough:

Yeah. Oh, God.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

The idea though that we just ignore it, seems to be a bit of an oversight, to say the least and-

Julian Gough:

But it's baked into reductionist, materialist science. You can't put consciousness into the picture, even though consciousness is always part of the fucking picture. So it distorts science. It's such a distortion, and they're not even aware of it half the time. Crazy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

It absolutely does. And I became absolutely fascinated with both consciousness and time, when I started reading a lot of quantum physics when I was young, because I was fascinated by it. And now they're seeing theories that say, "Oh, by the way, because of quantum entanglement" – which under Bell's theorem, everyone thought he was a madman. "Oh, that's crazy. What do you mean? God doesn't play dice," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then they proved it experimentally. But now I'm reading about the idea that they are also positing retro causality. In other words, our version of the future changes the past when doing the double slit experiments.

And so – wait a minute – that kind of calls into question our conception of time. It seems to me that if that is true, our conception of time is completely fucked and we need to-

Julian Gough:

Well, time is very tricky.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Consciousness, time… very, very tricky. So I think that they would absolutely make a great subject for a second book. You will have me as your very first read.

Julian Gough:

Good. I'll give you a highly speculative integration of the two right now… which is highly speculative! You could disagree with this, and still like a lot of what I'm saying about material reality. But entanglement, yeah, go back to John Stewart Bell. Good Belfast man…

Entanglement implies that everything in our universe is fundamentally connected at a quantum level, because at the time of the Big Bang, it was a singularity. It's coming from a singularity. The particles were all entangled at the start. No matter how much you've spread them out, they haven't stopped being entangled. So that gives you a possibility for a kind of cosmic consciousness, for a kind of knowledge of itself that the universe could have that isn't bounded by the speed of light, because everything is quantum entangled.

So the insight that the mystics get when they meditate for a few years, the insights that the Buddha had, the insights that you see in the Bhagavad Gita, that there is a transcendent consciousness that underlies it all, that connects it all, and that we are just floating nodes, little knots of localized consciousness, but we're attached to the great web of consciousness, could have completely explainable material roots in quantum entanglement. It's quite possible that we're just knots in the consciousness field, which is an entangled state of all the atoms in the universe, because they were all hyper-entangled at the singularity of the Big Bang.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And what's interesting, that's the one that I-

Julian Gough:

You talk about that, and you're treated like you're a nut, even though nobody's got a better take on it, because you're not allowed to mix consciousness and physics.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

What's interesting to me though, is Schrödinger – highly regarded in physics for many, many breakthroughs in quantum. His book, What is Life is essentially-

Julian Gough:

It's great fun, that book.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

If you haven't read it, you should read it. Because one of the things Schrödinger says is, all minds are one, essentially, right? And then you learn, well, wait a minute, he's just quoting Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.

And the other thing I find really interesting is that, you look into the lives of many of what even the least scientifically informed people would know who these folks were, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Schrödinger, Feynman, et cetera. What's really interesting to me is that they all became devotees of esoteric and eastern traditions. Einstein, right. When Einstein died, he had a copy of Isis Unveiled by his bedside. Feynman was in no way religious, but he loved Lilly tanks, which I also love. Isolation, sensory deprivation tanks, because-

Julian Gough:

Oh, yes, he did. Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And he believed that you could gain all sorts of insights that way. Oppenheimer, he's quoting the Gita when he's talking, “I am become death”.

Julian Gough:

The Gita is pretty good. I'm reading it again at the moment.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I re-read it often.

Julian Gough:

The Gita's just a fucking documentary. If you've had profound psychedelic experiences, you read the Gita and you go, "Oh my God, this is just documentary realism."

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yes. Yes.

Julian Gough:

It's just shocking.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

That is absolutely, yeah.

Julian Gough:

It's like, whoa. Someone was here before me and they took notes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

But what's really interesting to me is how, getting back to the fearful authoritarian view of modern science right now, these guys are your heroes and you're just conveniently avoiding the fact that they all went a very different way.

Julian Gough:

Late in life, pretty much all rationalist materialists have a little bit of a crisis, but they should. Actually Feynman's interesting. I stumbled on something recently. He did this great documentary back in 1973 or something, '75 on Yorkshire Television because I think his wife was from Yorkshire or something. He used to go there, and it's just this lovely documentary, but at the end of it, he's slightly tipsy in a pub talking to Fred Hoyle, the astronomer, Fred Hoyle, who came up with the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, the idea that stars made the elements through fusion. And they're having this great conversation about the future of physics, and they're both slightly drunk. And Feynman kind of riffs on the fact that every science except physics has a story of how you got to where you are now. Biology knows, how do you get to where we are now? Well, there's this evolutionary history… And every science has its evolutionary history. And he's saying physics is the only one that says, "This is the law. It has always been the law," and never asks where it comes from. And he's saying, "That might be the future of physics, that we really discover that there was an evolution," he says it, "an evolutionary history to the laws of physics." So in the seventies, Feynman was thinking, yeah, you’ve got to explain this thing and evolution, some evolutionary history, might be the solution. I was delighted to find he was on our team.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, he's one of my heroes. And I was aware of that view of his. I always had the image of the great and powerful Oz, right? “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” And you made me think of it when you were saying, physics says “This is the law.” It made me think of, “I am the great and powerful Oz.” What we need is Toto to pull back that little curtain.

Julian Gough:

Pull back the curtain. Where do the laws come from? Why are the laws like this? It's a perfectly valid question. And I think cosmological natural selection gives you an answer. There's a mechanism, Darwinian evolution. There's a specific way it could happen, through black holes and big bangs, through singularities, where we know that our laws don't work anymore, so that's a transition point where you could definitely get a reset that would allow this to happen.

And now at this point, we've got a three-stage model that gives you the evolutionary history of universes and shows how universes could, step by step, have iterated their way to this point. This is a very good theory, and it's insane that I'm probably the only person on earth being funded to research it. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life doing another failed big tank of xenon dark matter experiment?

Have you looked at the history of some of those experiments? The one under the mountain in Italy, that experiment where they started off with one and a half liters of liquid xenon and it only cost a million dollars, and they didn't find any dark matter, so they buried 300 liters of liquid xenon, and that only cost $15 million. And then they didn't discover anything, and the result of not discovering anything was, they were given another $50 million to bury 3000 gallons of xenon… And there's no level of failure will get your experiment canceled if it's officially sanctioned by the church. But there's no level of success that will get your experiment funded if it's not officially sanctioned by the church.

It's just the most funny thing. And that set of experiments, by the way, which they funded up to, I can't remember, 70, a hundred million, has now hit the neutrino fog. Their instruments are now so sensitive – this was announced last week – I think that they're now picking up neutrinos from the sun through their mile-and-a-half of mountain; which means that they're never going to find what they're looking for, because their instruments are going to be fogged out by the sun's neutrinos. So they've explored the entire possibility space where you could possibly find the dark matter they're looking for. It doesn't exist, as I could have happily told them for a lot less than $70 million. And they've burned through round after round of failed experiment until they're blinded by the fog of the sun.

And that's where people's lives are going. Join the heresy, guys. If you are an astronomer, or an astrophysicist, stuck in one of these silos of despair, bail out. Talk to me, email me. You don't have to do it in public. We can talk privately, but get on the team. There's going to be a reformation. A storm is coming. Cosmology is going to get turned upside down by this, when they finally realize it's an evolved universe.

What's happening here is: they are looking at a sack of chemicals, right? And they're trying to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals, and they're using really nice, simple models to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals. But the sack of chemicals is a dog. It's a dog, okay? Dogs do things for dog reasons, because they evolved, right? And if you're looking at the same sodium and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, but it's a dog, it's not just a bag of random chemicals – it just behaves differently. It develops differently over time. Look again at the universe. Is it behaving like a bag of chemicals, randomly chosen with random properties, or is it behaving like a fucking dog? It's behaving like a dog. It grows up, it bounces around the place. It gets more interesting and funny and complicated as it goes. It's a dog.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Right. It reminds me of, have you read any of Howard Bloom's stuff?

Julian Gough:

The literary critic or-

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

No, no, no.

Julian Gough:

No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

This is-

Julian Gough:

The other guy.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, the other guy. I think you will love some of his stuff. Well, Julian-

Julian Gough:

I think I've read a tiny bit, but I definitely haven't read the main stuff. No.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I am getting the hook from my producers here, and we haven't even had a chance to talk about literature, and all that fun stuff so I will-

Julian Gough:

This is more fun.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I will invite you back on for furtherance of this conversation, but also I want to get into tragedy and comedy, because I, like you, think that comedy is a much richer vein to mine, and it's a shame that it doesn't seem to be so. So if you've listened or watched the podcast in the past, you'd know that our final question is always: we are going to make you the emperor of the universe for one day. You can't kill anyone. You can't throw anyone in a reeducation camp. But what we're going to give you is a magical microphone in which you can say two things.

And everyone, let's just keep it on earth. Just let's keep it to the 8 billion people on earth. But you're going to say two things into a magical microphone that are going to incept the entire population. They're going to wake up the next day, whenever their next day is, and they're going to say, "You know what? I've just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times, I'm not going to ignore them. I'm going to act on them, and I'm going to see where that leads." What two things are you going to incept?

Julian Gough:

I actually have a very clean, simple answer to this question, because when I was a young man – it took me a long time to grow up. It really took me a very long time to grow up. But when I was a young man, I meditated a certain amount, and I had one meditation session where I somehow – even though I was a very irresponsible, silly young man who didn't know anything – I actually went pretty deep. I actually went pretty deep. I just sat there long enough that even I went pretty deep, and I heard a voice. I heard a voice, and the voice said, "Accept everything."

And I would like to incept that to everyone, because “accept everything”, I've applied it as much as I can, and it's really, really good advice. It really changes things. And because I was a greedy young man, I felt, wow, I've had this experience… And I was coming back out then, after hearing this voice saying, "Accept everything," because it had almost lifted me out of the experience, but I was greedy. So I said, as the experience was fading, "Is there anything else I should know?" And the voice added something, which I'll make the second part of my inception. The voice added, "Do not ration your love."

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Oh, I love that.

Julian Gough:

Yeah, so that's what I'm going to tell everybody. If I were the emperor of the universe, I would say, accept everything, and do not ration your love.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Wow, those are fabulous. Kind of reminds me of amor fati. That falls in line very nicely with, accept everything. Julian, this has actually surpassed my expectations, which were very high coming in.

Julian Gough:

Oh, that's great to hear. Well, I love it talking about this. I just love these ideas. I love these ideas. Why aren't more people playing with these ideas? Come and play with me. It's just… why aren't more people playing with this? It's like this giant lump of gold, which for purely sociological reasons got left in the middle of the road, and I get to play with it. It's like, please just turn it into something useful, guys. This is too much gold for one guy. Take it!

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And tell our listeners and viewers how they can get in touch and play with you.

Julian Gough:

Oh, yeah. Well, I'm writing the book in public, on a website called The Egg and the Rock. The Egg and the Rock: is our universe behaving like an egg or a rock; two views of this universe. And The Egg and the Rock is just theeggandtherock.com, so come and join me. You can subscribe to it for free. All the posts are up for free. Some people pay to help me do it, which is nice. You paid to help me do it, which is nice. But you don't have to. It's all free. I want the ideas to spread. So, subscribe, but also comment. You can just comment on the site. You can email me. It’s my name at gmail.com. [Or, you know, just click on this link now.] You can get in touch. There's all sorts of channels for getting in touch with me. Use all of them. I'm on Twitter. I'm here and there. Talk to me down any channel that you're comfortable with, and give me your ideas.

This is a whole new continent to explore and nobody's exploring it, and people from outside the mainstream fields can actually make real contributions. It's this unbelievably rich frontier. But if you're a deep domain expert in any of these areas, please talk to me as well. I'm talking to an astrophysicist in two days time who's an expert in gravitational lensing, and she's got some really interesting data on the oversimplistic models they're using for gravitational lensing. The models where they are currently explaining everything through dark matter, because they can't explain why things are so magnified. It turns out that there's these complicated lensing effects, when you have light passing through complex gravitational structures like clusters and super clusters. And there's, oh my God, there's so many things are being missed in cosmology because they've used dark matter as a fudge factor to fix everything that's wrong with the underlying basis of the theory.

We live in a complicated universe that's doing complicated things, and we can't keep trying to simplifying it back to just a bunch of random gases. That's not what we're living inside. That's not what we are, and it's not what the great membrane-bound, strange structure that we're part of, that generated us, is. We're not an accident at the edge of a simplicity. We're the simplicity inside a complexity that we are completely failing to understand. We don't understand what we're looking at.

And I think an evolutionary approach liberates us to see what we're actually looking at. It's a living universe. We're just the taste buds, or the sense organs, of a living universe that is developing, that's coming into knowledge of itself. And we're the point where it's coming into knowledge of itself. We're the point where the universe gets to know who it is, what it is, and what it's going to do next. It's an amazing moment to be alive, and to have a dead-matter cosmology, with a one-shot universe that means nothing, at the core of our belief system… it's a catastrophe for humanity that that's the case. Okay. I'll stop preaching.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

No, that's the classic mic drop, which is perfect. What a perfect way to end.

Julian Gough:

Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Julian, until I have you on for the second time, I have so enjoyed myself. Thank you so much.

Julian Gough:

You too, Jim. It's lovely to talk to somebody who gets where I'm coming from, and where I'm going to. It's just a joy. It's a joy.

OK, that was it! Hope you enjoyed it – and if you did, please, seriously, share it. Your direct recommendation of these ideas to another human being makes a huge difference. Also, if you’re not a subscriber, let’s fix that now; I believe these ideas need you, and you need these ideas. Hit subscribe below, it’s free. There is also a paid option, if you do want to support my work here. It’s always hugely appreciated, but feel no obligation. These ideas deserve to spread, and I am not paywalling them. If you’d like to make a one-off donation of any size, that’s very kind of you; here’s a link to my Paypal. But again, feel no obligation. I’m trying to run this project outside of capitalism, and inside the gift economy. Grants from the Irish Arts Council, Emergent Ventures and O’Shaughnessy Ventures, plus paid subscriptions from some of my subscribers, have kept this project afloat for the past three years. Next year, who knows. But so far, so good.

The paper, “The Rise of Faint, Red AGN at z > 4: A Sample of Little Red Dots in the JWST Extragalactic Legacy Fields”, by Dale D. Kocevski, Steven L. Finkelstein, Guillermo Barro, et al. (Fifty-seven authors!), does a detailed spectral analysis of the light from 341 of those little red dots, to finally work out exactly what they are. And yes, it confirms what three-stage cosmological natural selection predicted: that the very early universe is dominated by active supermassive black holes, around which compact galaxies are rapidly forming. “Active” means these supermassive black holes are pulling in a lot of gas, and pumping out a lot of energy, making these young galaxies far brighter than if you just measured the light from their stars. And yes, these supermassive black holes are far larger, and far more numerous, and appear far earlier, than had been predicted by any other theory. This paper is a resounding triumph for three-stage cosmological natural selection. (A theory which really needs a far snappier name; something cheeky and memorable, à la “black hole”, or “big bang”. In honour of the organising metaphor for my book, I’m thinking of going with Eggiverse for now, which makes the old paradigm the Rockiverse. Please do make your own suggestions in the comments…)

As a bonus, the paper reveals that some of these Little Red Dots also show signs of gas outflows near the black hole, which is evidence for the extremely early, powerful, sustained jets which I believe are the main force (along with gravity, obviously) behind structure formation in the early universe. (See, eventually, my forthcoming mega-post on Blowtorch Theory: Structure Formation in the Early Universe, when I finally finish editing and polishing the damn thing.)

To celebrate all this, I’m publishing three emails from May last year, that throw an interesting light on how and why the mainstream astronomical community had trouble initially interpreting the data they were getting from the James Webb. (Their preconceptions, understandably and very humanly, made it hard for them to see what they were looking at. Yes, All Cosmology’s Mistakes Continue To Lean In the Same Direction.)

Marc Kamionkowski, Julian B. Munoz, and Nashwan Sabti are three (extremely respectable, and mainstream, and excellent!) cosmologists who suspected, earlier than most, that there was something wrong with how the James Webb data was being interpreted. They laid out their argument in their thoughtful February 2024 paper, in Physical Review Letters, “Insights from HST into Ultramassive Galaxies and Early-Universe Cosmology”.

That paper pointed out that the way mainstream astronomy was interpreting the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data simply didn’t make sense, in the light of our existing Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data. Mainstream astronomers were interpreting all the brightness, all the light, from these tiny, distant, early, red galaxies (as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope), as being made by stars alone: but for that to be true, those extremely young galaxies would have to be packed with more stars than we saw in similar but much older galaxies (as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope). Many galaxies would have to become significantly smaller over time for the two sets of data to match up.

So there was clearly a serious problem with the way mainstream cosmology was interpreting these little red dots.

I thought I knew the answer, so I emailed Marc a question. He replied, and copied in his co-author, Julian B. Munoz, who also replied. Their answers were fascinating, and so Marc and Julian B. have both very kindly given me permission to publish our brief email correspondence here. (Or, as Marc less formally actually said, I’ve looked it over, and there’s nothing too incriminating…) So, three emails…

EMAIL ONE, JULIAN GOUGH TO MARC KAMIONKOWSKI

My May 2024 email to Marc Kamionkowski, an excellent theoretical physicist at John Hopkins University, who specializes in cosmology and particle physics. It was a cold email, i.e. I’d never made contact with him before, thus the rather boastful-sounding intro – very embarrassing and difficult stuff for an Irishman to write, but of course you’re asking for the valuable time of a busy person, so you have to show them you are serious about your work, and that this stranger and their project are worth engaging with. Oh well, I told you I’d show you the embarrassing behind the scenes work that goes into writing a book!

24 May 2024, 12:42pm

Dear Marc,

I'm intrigued by your recent paper, Insights from HST into Ultramassive Galaxies and Early-Universe Cosmology, and I'd love to ask you a question about it.

I know that cosmologists get a lot of crank emails from lunatics, so here's a quick bit of personal background/social validation, to (I hope!) reassure you that I'm not a nut, and this email is worth answering: I'm an Irish writer based in Berlin. I usually write novels and children's books (which are now published in 37 languages). I've also written some more unusual things, like BBC radio plays, the first short story ever published by the Financial Times, and the ending to the most successful computer game of all time, Minecraft.

Right now I'm writing a non-fiction book that explores, and expands on, Lee Smolin's old idea of cosmological natural selection. On the literary side, I've received funding for the project from the Irish Arts Council, and on the more scientifically rigorous side, I've received funding from Emergent Ventures, a grant-giving body for unusual but promising ideas run by the economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University. People like Kevin Kelly (who founded Wired magazine), and Johannes Jaeger (former scientific director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research in Austria) think the project is interesting and are supporting it.

So, here's the question!

Assume that large numbers of direct collapse supermassive black holes form very early in the life of the universe (the first 100 million years or so), and seed the rapid early formation of galaxies around themselves. (Yes, this is a big assumption! But just assume it is the case for now.) Put another way, imagine that the early universe is full of galaxies like UHZ1; in other words, that Overmassive Black Hole Galaxies turn out to be ubiquitous. (As is now looking more likely, after the Yue/Eilers/Simcoe paper out of MIT this month, showing that six quasars at 5.9 < z < 7.1 have central supermassive black holes which average 10% the mass of their surrounding galaxies...)

In that case, could the tension between the Hubble data and the James Webb Space Telescope data be resolved if the early galaxies seen by the James Webb Space Telescope were not, in fact, far more massive than expected but were simply far BRIGHTER than expected, due to unexpected amounts of early quasar activity, as gas fell into the direct collapse supermassive black holes – and because this extremely bright quasar-light from the accretion discs is being interpreted purely as starlight, very large stellar mass is (wrongly) being assumed? (Of course, the early galaxies could still be more massive than anticipated, but not MASSIVELY so. And the quasars could be partially obscured by dust and gas, making it harder to tell they are essentially point sources.)

Is there anything currently in the data to rule this out as a possible explanation (however unlikely)?

Any answer, however brief or tentative, would be greatly appreciated! (If you prefer a brief phonecall or Zoom to email, that's fine by me too, whatever suits you best. My phone number is +49 *** *** ****.) It would be of huge help to me at this stage in the planning/writing of the book.

Best of luck with your excellent work.

Fond regards,

-Julian

EMAIL TWO: MARC KAMIONKOWSKI TO JULIAN GOUGH

24 May 2024, 22:44

Hi Julian,

You got me with Minecraft. My son is obsessed, and I might get some cred with him if I tell him I’m emailing with the author of the End Poem.

My first inclination is to say that the answer to your question is yes. I.e., I do think it may be possible that the Hubble and JWST data could be resolved if the JWST galaxies are simply a lot brighter, and not as massive as they are reported to be. Many of the inferences about these high-redshift galaxies are obtained by extrapolating relations for lower-redshift galaxies, and it is not clear whether those extrapolations hold up. I therefore take many of the implications reported from high-redshift JWST galaxies with a grain of salt.

About the second part: Could the light that they are interpreting as starlight be emission radiated from accretion onto the black hole? That’s an interesting question, but I’m not the best person to answer it. I know that the frequency spectrum from accretion disks looks a lot different than that from starlight (its distributed over a far broader range of frequencies and has a different spectrum of atomic lines), but I don’t know enough about the data to say whether they can distinguish this scenario from the standard one.

With this email message, though, I am introducing you to my collaborators Julian and Nash, both of whom have been paying far more attention to these JWST results than I. They are better equipped to give you good answers and also to point you to others if they are also not sure.

Cheers,

Marc

EMAIL THREE: JULIAN B. MUNOZ TO JULIAN GOUGH

25 May 2024, 01:03

Dear fellow Julian,

Nice to virtually meet you! You've hit the nail on the head. From photometry alone (that is, integrated light over some broad range of wavelengths) it's hard to distinguish an ultramassive galaxy from a fainter galaxy with a big AGN in the center (active galactic nucleus, which is to say a supermassive black hole). That's because the AGN will emit very broad and bright lines in that range, which when integrated can mask as a higher 'continuum' (light emitted by a lot of old stars). You need spectra to distinguish the two cases, which can show the broadening of the lines as Marc mentioned.

The interesting thing is that new results are finding an abundance of `little red dots' that look like AGNs (from the paper you cited as well as Kokorev+24 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09981, Matthee+23 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05448, or Greene+ 23 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05714), so it's very likely the ultramassive galaxies that "broke cosmology" are just regular galaxies hosting AGNs, which make them appear red when not modeled correctly!

As an example, the two most massive objects in the Labbé+ paper actually turned out to be AGNs. One of them was spectroscopically followed up in here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09482

and turned out to have a much smaller stellar mass (source-ID 20 in Table 2 should be one of the big Labbé galaxies). Also Endsley's paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.14999

Fig 14 they show that there's likely a point source contributing a lot of light. That point source is likely to be an AGN.

Best,

Julian

ENDS…

Thanks again to Marc and Julian B. for letting me show you that peek behind the scenes. Hope you enjoyed it. You can see why it’s taking so long to transition from the old paradigm to the new. A lot of assumptions have to be rethought from scratch. But, it’s happening! Fascinating times…

If all that makes you want to know more about the theory of three-stage cosmological natural selection which is making these excellent predictions, go watch this Youtube primer I did with Jim O’Shaughnessy on Infinite Loops, or listen to it as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, or over on Spotify.

If you haven’t subscribed, please do, it’s free and it means you will be emailed fresh posts as I put them up. And as ever, please do share with anyone you think might be interested.

“In a galaxy assumed to be filled with clever beings, why don't we see any? This dissonance is known as the Fermi Paradox.”

― The SETI Institute
(SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

One of the arguments in the book I’m messily writing in public here, online, is that all technological civilisations will ultimately converge on the manufacture of lots and lots of small black holes for energy production, as they are, by far, the most efficient energy source in our universe. Black holes can, potentially, convert up to 42% of any mass that you chuck into them into energy. Fission can only convert roughly 0.1% of its fuel into energy, while fusion at its most efficient converts roughly 0.7%. And yes, in answer to the question from the smart-arse at the back: matter/antimatter annihilation would be 100% efficient, but there isn't any freely available antimatter in our universe, while making antimatter takes far more energy than you can get back, so black holes still win…

Yes I’m glossing over the technical difficulties of artificially manufacturing a small black hole (the task is far beyond our current technologies), and of safely running one as a power source, and then harvesting gravitational energy as well as electromagnetic energy, all of which are non-trivial problems. You’re not just sitting around the black hole, passively harvesting Hawking radiation: any decent sized black hole emits far too little Hawking radiation, far too slowly. Instead, you need to actively feed it matter as fuel, and then, as that infalling matter accelerates to close to lightspeed around it, forming the hot doughnut of an accretion disc, you harvest the radiated energy from all that disintegrating matter – so you are basically building and feeding a tiny quasar. Tricky! However, it’s all theoretically do-able within the known laws of physics, so given the staggering benefits in terms of energy efficiency, it will probably, eventually, be done.

“If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.”

― David Deutsch, British physicist, in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (a book I highly recommend)

THE WEIRD IMPLICATION

But that may well anchor technological civilisations to their home solar system! A small artificial black hole, with roughly the mass of Mount Everest, can pump out a stunning, hard-to-conceptualise amount of power. Mount Everest has a mass somewhere between ten-to-the-fourteen to ten-to-the-fifteen kilograms (depending on your definition of where a mountain starts), i.e. between about one hundred trillion and one quadrillion kilograms. There’s a lot of asteroids floating around in that size range, so you could quite easily flood your local solar system with many, many sources of essentially unlimited power.

Question: Oooofff, that’s a big engineering project. Why not make them much less massive? Hey, boulder-mass black holes! Why not put one in every vehicle?

Answer: Because extremely low-mass black holes evaporate much too fast, through Hawking radiation. If a black hole’s mass is cut to a thousandth of its original size, its lifetime is a billion times shorter, because the lifetime shrinks with the cube of the mass. Small enough, and they go off like a bomb, in seconds. No, Mount Everest-sized black holes are at the sweet spot – they are manageably small, but large enough not to evaporate – and thus explode – inside the lifetime of any conceivable civilisation.

But then you can't use your most efficient energy source to power spacecraft, because you aren't going to be able to accelerate a black hole with the mass of Mount Everest to anything like the speed you would need to travel between the stars. One quadrillion kilograms (1,000,000,000,000,000 kgs) is an unreal amount of inertia to overcome. (And if you did manage to get it going, imagine the energy required to slow the bastard on arrival.)

So you would have to use far less efficient energy sources to drive any starships. Bussard ramjets, or Ram Augmented Interstellar Rockets, perhaps. How might that work? Well, once a ramjet spaceship can get up to speed, it can use magnetic fields to trap any ionised hydrogen gas in the space the ship is moving through, and funnel it to a point where it can fuse: so it’s a fusion drive that doesn’t have to carry all its fuel. But it’s still only getting 0.7% energy from that fuel, and you still have the problem of getting it up to a fast enough speed for the ramjet to work. And it is now generally thought that the drag generated by the magnetic “scoop” on a pure Bussard ramjet would outweigh the acceleration any fusion was able to cause. This has led to the proposal of hybrid designs, like Ram Augmented Interstellar Rockets, and Laser Powered Interstellar Ramjets… (Worth clicking on the link to that 1977 paper by D. P. Whitmire and Albert Jackson, for a nostalgic wallow in the crude, grainy typeset of the scanned PDF, and to remind yourself that people dreamed big back then. Let’s recover that energy, and dream bigger!)

Anyway, yes, you probably could do this, but civilisations do not like going technologically backwards. Using a draggy old ramjet, in an age of hyper-efficient and technologically advanced black hole energy production, would be as though, in a world of supercomputers and AI and unlimited fusion energy, you had to cross the Atlantic by steamboat.

We don’t have good intuitions for how big the true gap is between our current most energy-efficient production method here on earth (nuclear fission), and black holes as a power source: it’s not just that black holes can give you roughly 400 times more energy per gram of fuel, but that the fuel for fission reactors is extremely rare stuff like uranium-235 (just one atom in every fifty million on Earth is made of uranium-235). Fusion is a bit better: you squeeze out seven times more energy from your fuel than fission does, but again, the most easily used fuel for fusion is deuterium, and that is not very abundant either. (Maybe 0.015% of the hydrogen in Earth’s oceans is deuterium.)

EAT DIRT

Whereas the fuel for black holes could be literally dirt. You could throw anything at all into a small black hole, and have a huge percentage of those juicy, energy-packed protons and neutrons turned into energy. You turn your whole solar system into potential hyper-energetic fuel. (Landfill is no longer a problem! Yes, I joked about this already in my satirical short story, The iHole. No, the science in the iHole is not accurate, nor meant to be, it’s comedy.)

So, once you’ve moved your main energy source over to technologically-produced small black holes, many earlier, less efficient technologies (like fission and fusion and, oh yes, burning stuff you’ve dug out of the ground) will tend to wither away.

But now you have a main power source that cannot be used to drive spacecraft, because the intrinsically high mass of any black hole, relative to its power output, makes it grotesquely hard to accelerate. (You can accelerate it a little, because the power output is so astonishingly high – but not to anything close to lightspeed.)

That doesn’t rule out interstellar travel, but it does makes it much, much harder. I think we have a naive intuition that, as power sources improve, starship travel will automatically get faster and easier. That breaks down with black holes.

And it matters because stars are very, very, very, very, very far away. Light itself, travelling as fast as anything at all ever can in this universe, takes a second to get from Earth to the moon, eight minutes to get from there to the sun… and over four years to get to the next nearest star (which isn’t even a good one). Humans have only ever travelled one light second from Earth, and it took much of the resources of the richest country on earth to do that. And we couldn’t sustain it. For the past fifty years, no human being has made it out of Earth orbit. Four lightyears… is a stretch. Spaceflight is hard.

YOU CAN SPEED UP… BUT NOT SLOW DOWN

That’s not to say interstellar travel isn’t helped at all by small black holes.

One possibility is that you could use the ludicrous amounts of energy they produce to laboriously manufacture enough antimatter to power a matter/antimatter drive. That solves the accelerating-Mount-Everest problem (you only have to accelerate the fuel – antimatter – not the immense mass that is used to make the fuel – the black hole), but it’s an eye-wateringly expensive way to make small amounts of lightweight fuel. We actually know how to make antimatter – we make it in particle accelerators, a few atoms at a time. But currently it would take 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy to make one gram of antimatter. (Oh, and the current cost of doing that would be one hundred trillion dollars.) That’s for one gram of fuel.

Alternative possibility: you could have your efficient power source (=small black hole made out of an asteroid) in your native solar system, and use it to generate, say, an extremely powerful laser to drive a light sail, to accelerate your spacecraft towards a nearby star. You don’t have to carry fuel at all! Huge weight saving. But now you've got a horrendous deceleration problem at the other end, if you’re not going to just whizz past the star at close to the speed of light. How do you bring your lightsail-ship back DOWN from near-lightspeed? You would need another black-hole-powered laser already in place at the other star, to slow it. (Yes, Laser Powered Interstellar Ramjets might solve this by USING the otherwise unwelcome drag of their ramjets to decelerate. But it’s still a big problem.)

So you could, very slowly, using old-fashioned methods like ramjets (or a staggeringly expensive antimatter drive) reach other nearby stars, build out your civilisation around that new star, build small technologically-manufactured black holes, and set up a decelerator laser at the other side… But this still puts quite a brake on expansion rates. And it just makes the whole business far more of a slog, and less attractive.

Anyway, at first glance, this looks like an interesting local maximum that a civilisation could get trapped at. Not that it would be impossible to become a star-faring civilisation, but that there would be significant pressures against it. And significant pressure to explore and exploit (and beautify, and delight in!) your own solar system very fully before leaving it.

And of course that makes it a possible contribution to answering the Fermi paradox. (That is, if there are lots of aliens out there, then where are they, and why aren't they popping by for a cup of tea and some biscuits?)

Obviously, there are many, many more factors involved in the Fermi paradox. This is just one. But I haven’t seen this one stated before, so I thought I’d throw it out there. I’m not putting it forward as an answer, but as an intriguing new contribution to a complex ongoing conversation.

Anyone got any thoughts on this? What am I missing? Please do throw your ideas, and any feedback both positive and negative, into the comments.

PS: If you are new here – and I know a lot of you are, because I’ve picked up a lot of new followers since Christmas – hi.

If you want to come up to speed on the theory I’m exploring here, watch this Youtube video (or read the transcript). Or listen to it as a podcast on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.

Read this post if you want to know what predictions this theory has made about the early universe.

Read this post if you want to know how those predictions have been confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope.

If you just want a lighter and more fun read about the implications of the theory I am exploring, read this post.

If you simply want to keep up to date on this conversation about the universe as it goes forward, subscribe and you will be emailed all my posts for free the second I put them up.

And if you want to help, just share any of my posts with any friends who might be interested. This is not a normal time in cosmology: the old paradigms are breaking down and new ones are being born. You can really make a difference at the margins. Spread the word! Get involved! These are exciting times!

Last year, the James Webb Space Telescope made a startling new discovery about how, and where, planets can form. In a nearby star-making region, it spotted a bunch of recently-formed, roughly-Jupiter-sized planets, still warm from their formation, that weren’t attached to – weren’t orbiting – stars. A surprisingly large number of those Jupiter-sized planets were in binaries, with two Jupiters orbiting each other – but, again, with no star involved. (See the fascinating paper, Jupiter Mass Binary Objects in the Trapezium Cluster, by Samuel G Pearson and Mark J McCaughrean.)

The discovery of so many standalone planets implies that most of the life in our universe may not be on planets orbiting stars. But the implication isn’t immediately obvious from the study, and so doesn’t seem to have been fully appreciated yet. (If I’m wrong, and someone has been making this point elsewhere, please send me a link and I’ll credit them.) So let me walk you through the logic here…

IS THERE LIFE ON MAAAAAAAAAARS?

Let's think about where we are most likely to find life in our universe. We may as well start with the only life we have direct knowledge of: our own.

We are alive. (Hurray!)

How come?

• Well, we live on a rocky planet, with a liquid water ocean exposed on its surface.

• All life on Earth came from that ocean. (Because liquid water facilitates all the chemistry of life.)

• The ocean stays liquid, and life stays alive, thanks to a constant flow of highly energetic sunlight from the star our planet orbits.

Because those three things seem pretty fundamental to life on Earth, we have historically tended to assume that life elsewhere in the universe would also be found on planets very similar to Earth.

But, if you look around our solar system, it contains several other rocky planets, also orbiting our sun, and none of them have been able to hang onto a liquid water ocean – or, as far as we can tell, develop complex life. Let’s take a quick look at all four rocky planets, in order of distance from the sun, and see how they are doing after 5 billion years.

• Mercury (between 46 and 70 million kilometers from the sun – yeah, that’s a pretty eccentric orbit): Too darn hot. Everything just boiled away into space. It doesn't even have an atmosphere anymore. It’s hot enough to melt metals like tin and lead, great. And it’s so close to the sun that its rotation has been slowed, so that a single day (sunrise to sunrise) now lasts for roughly a hundred and seventy-six Earth days – and the daytime temperature reaches 430°C (or 800°F, or 703 K). But don’t worry, you can cool down during the six-month-long nights, when it drops to minus 180°C (or -290°F, or 93 K). Yuk.

• Venus (roughly 108 million kilometers from the sun): Too hot. Seems to have generated way too much carbon dioxide (96% of its, extremely thick, atmosphere). It therefore cooked itself, through a runaway greenhouse effect (all that CO2 trapping the sun’s heat), which boiled any water it might have had. It now rains sulphuric acid instead. But hey, you’re in luck! It’s even hotter than Mercury, reaching 465°C (or 869°F, or 738 K) – so the sulphuric acid raindrops evaporate before they reach the ground!

• Earth (roughly 150 million kilometers from the sun): Neither too hot, not too cold! Like baby bear’s porridge! We’re doing great! Liquid water oceans, and so life is partying hard pretty much everywhere. (Some big deserts, and frozen at the poles, but you can’t have everything.)

• Mars (between roughly 207 and 249 million kilometers from the sun –yeah, eccentric orbit): Too darn cold. Used to have liquid water oceans, but they dried out over a billion years ago, and most of its atmosphere has since blown away, along with much of the evaporated water. Now it’s cold and desolate, with an occasional thin layer of white carbon-dioxide frost at the poles, in a sad parody of a planet with a real water cycle. Maybe Mars has some microbes living in the remaining water, deep under its radiation-blasted surface, but that’s it.

So, from an evolved-universe point of view, it doesn't really look as though the basic parameters of matter have been optimised by evolution to create the conditions for life on the exposed surfaces of rocky planets. Rocky planets have to be in quite a tight Goldilocks zone – not too hot, not too cold – and they have to get lucky. (Even lucky old Earth has had several mass extinction events, when asteroids hit its exposed surface ocean. The dinosaurs, most famously, were taken out globally, 65 million years ago, by a single rock the size of Mount Everest hitting the Gulf of Mexico.)

But our theory argues that intelligent, technology-wielding life in a universe helps that universe reproduce. (See this for more details, if you’re new here.) So, if biological life is evolutionarily beneficial to universes (if it helps the universe itself to reproduce), then over many generations of universe, evolution should have optimised universes for the production of life. The conditions for life should therefore be common and stable, not rare and unstable, as they seem to be on the surfaces of rocky planets.

So… Is there somewhere else in our solar system (and, by extension, our universe) where the conditions for life are common, and stable? Let's think about that.

(TAKE A QUICK ZOOM-INTO-THE-MOONS BREAK)

(Substack, very sensibly, compresses monster images like the one above – most people most of the time do not want to look at a 15 megabyte image on their phone – so unfortunately you can’t zoom in, and see the full glory here. I recommend you instead click on this link to the fabulous 15 megabyte original, zoom into that, and explore for a while. It will give you a terrific crash course in the moons of our solar system.)

BACK TO BASICS

Another way to think about where we might find life, then, is to think about the absolute basics that would be required. Not the specifics, the basics.

They seem to be:

1. A liquid water ocean

2. A source of heat

3. A source of nutrients

When we look around our own solar system with those three things in mind, the most likely places to find life turn out not to be small rocky planets with surface water oceans heated by the sun.

Instead we come up with the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter (and of Neptune and Uranus, but we have sent a single, less sophisticated probe to them – Voyager 2 – less recently – it launched 1977 – so we have less data). There are a lot of icy moons in our solar system, and a large number seem to have substantial liquid water oceans. (Jupiter’s moon Europa is only the size of our own moon, yet it has a liquid water ocean twice the volume of all the water on Earth.)

How can all this liquid water be? After all, these moons are much further away from the sun than the earth is (or Mercury; or Venus; or Mars), and these lunar surfaces are therefore frozen. Not just frozen, but deep frozen: Europa is minus 150°C (or -238°F, or 123 K) in the daytime (and colder again at night).

WHO LOVES THE SUN? NOT JUST ANYONE…

And, indeed, as it turns out, the sun has basically nothing to do with it.

These liquid water oceans lie deep beneath the frozen surface of the icy moons. They are kept liquid by heat from their molten rocky cores. Those cores are kept molten, in turn, by gravitational friction, as the moons orbit Saturn or Jupiter (or Uranus or Neptune) in slightly eccentric orbits.

A TIDE INSIDE THE MOON: GRAVITATIONAL FRICTION

How does that work? Well, as the moon moves closer to, then further from, the planet with every orbit, the centre of the icy moon is tugged on harder, then softer, by the planet’s enormous gravity. It generates tides inside the moon.

This gravitational back-and-forth friction steadily transmits gravitational energy from the enormous planet to the far smaller moon. And friction means heat. That heat melts the rocky core of the moon (a core which is already being heated by the pressure of all the weight above it). And it melts the lighter ice above the core. As this process is going on constantly – as heat is being generated in the core by gravitational friction with every orbit – the ocean stays liquid, all around the moon, in a zone that can be hundreds of miles deep. (The deepest the oceans get on earth is only seven miles.)

EFFICIENCY: ELECTRIC KETTLE VERSUS DISTANT BURNING WAREHOUSE

This is an extremely efficient way to keep water liquid, compared to the extremely inefficient method for keeping Earth’s oceans liquid. Earth has to have an entire star pump crazy amounts of energy out in all directions – covering the entire sphere of mostly empty space around it, and cooking the planets nearest it – in order to have 0.000000045% of that light (so, less than a billionth) fall on the Earth, keeping our oceans from freezing. (And, as these oceans are exposed on the surface, with just a few kilograms of air per square inch insulating them from the chill of space, they would freeze pretty fast without that heat from the sun). Indeed, the oceans at the poles do, in fact, freeze once a year, in the depths of their respective winters.

Put another way, icy moons are like electric kettles: all the energy is used to heat the water.

The exposed surfaces of rocky planets heated by a star, however… Well, it's like using a blazing warehouse a mile away to make a cup of tea.

You can see why the evolution of universes might favour the gravitational friction/electric kettle model, once it's emerged.

So that’s number 1, liquid water oceans, and number 2, heat. Icy moons beat rocky planets on both counts. Much more water, much more efficiently heated.

What about number 3, nutrients?

NUTRIENTS

Well, we recently discovered that the liquid water oceans on the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn seem to contain all the nutrients necessary for life, too. (I wrote about it here.) As on earth, hot vents on the ocean floor pump carbon, sulphur, phosphorus, etc., up from the molten core and into the ocean. The bottleneck nutrient was phosphorus: it tends to get trapped in rocks, and not be available for life. But we've managed to sample the water that emerges from the ice-volcanos of Enceladus (an icy moon of Saturn), and discovered it is far richer in available phosphorus than even the oceans of Earth. (See the original excellent paper from last year, Detection of phosphates originating from Enceladus’s ocean, by Frank Postberg, Yasuhito Sekine, Fabian Klenner, et al.)

So the molten rocky cores provide both heat and nutrients.

It therefore looks as though the basic parameters of matter in our universe have been optimised by evolution to generate the conditions for life in the liquid water oceans of icy moons, rather than on rocky planets.

NO GOLDILOCKS ZONE REQUIRED

Most moons in the outer (colder) reaches of any solar system are going to be icy (just as most comets are icy) because H2O is the main raw material floating around out there (other than primordial hydrogen), as such moons form. And, crucially, for icy moons, there's no particular Goldilocks zone. Any icy moon orbiting any large gas giant planet will have a liquid water ocean if its orbit is even slightly eccentric – and they usually are pretty eccentric, because that's what the chaos of the formation of a solar system gives you. And, even better, moons tend to slip into resonance with each other, which preserves and keeps stable the eccentricity of their orbits. Ganymede, Europa, and Io, for example, are in 1:2:4 resonance with each other: that is, for every single orbit of Jupiter that Ganymede makes, Europa makes two, and Io makes four. That keeps all three orbits stable, longterm: if one were to drift slightly, the others would gravitationally nudge it back into resonance.

So what we are seeing here is a strong, simple, robust, self-stabilising system that should automatically build out large numbers of potentially habitable worlds in every solar system. Order automatically emerges from randomness, and is automatically maintained. There’s no delicate single-point-of-failure to worry about. No precise, narrow Goldilocks zone you have to stay in.

PROTECTION

And if life does develop on an icy moon, it’s far better protected than on the surface of a rocky planet like Earth. The frozen surface of an icy moon is usually many kilometres thick, and at a temperature so cold that the ice is stronger than ceramic. (Ice gets more brittle, but also harder, the colder it gets.) Thus the oceans beneath are protected from solar flares, cosmic rays, radiation from nearby supernova explosions, and the kind of asteroid event that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

Oceans under miles of ice are also protected from evaporation into space, which is a big problem on small rocky worlds with low gravity, where the solar wind steadily strips away atmosphere, including evaporated water. That's what fucked Mars. (And of course – even closer, even hotter – Mercury.) But that can’t happen to THESE oceans.

As a result of all this, some great scientists, like Kevin Hand, Carolyn Porco, Chris McKay, Steve Vance, Jonathan Lunine, and Robert Pappalardo, have been arguing for years for a complete rethink on where we should be looking for life. Alan Stern is one of them.

“Oceans are ubiquitous. Most of them are in the outer solar system. And they could be abodes for life. This is a fundamental sea change in the way we view the solar system.”
– Sol Alan Stern, a guy who has done everything, working as an astrophysicist, an engineer, a planetary scientist, and the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

LIFE WITHOUT STARS

That’s all great. But the situation may be even more extreme than Alan Stern and the others argue. As I mentioned up front, a recent discovery indicates that evolution may have selected very hard indeed for life in the liquid water oceans of icy moons. So hard that we may not need stars at all for life to evolve there.

Now, obviously, we still need stars to make all the elements (by fusion, in their core) and distribute them (by supernova explosion), so there can be planets in the first place.

But, once that is done, the model we are so familiar with – a star orbited by a planet, and that planet orbited by a moon – may not be the dominant model in our universe.

Here’s the abstract from Jupiter Mass Binary Objects in the Trapezium Cluster, by Samuel G Pearson and Mark J McCaughrean. (I’ll expand on its implications below)…

ABSTRACT

“A key outstanding question in star and planet formation is how far the initial mass function of stars and sub-stellar objects extends, and whether or not there is a cutoff at the very lowest masses. Isolated objects in the planetary-mass domain below 13 Jupiter masses, where not even deuterium can fuse, are very challenging to observe as these objects are inherently faint. Nearby star-forming regions provide the best opportunity to search for them though: while they are young, they are still relatively warm and luminous at infrared wavelengths. Previous surveys have discovered a handful of such sources down to 3–5 Jupiter masses, around the minimum mass limit established for formation via the fragmentation of molecular clouds, but does the mass function extend further? In a new James Webb Space Telescope near-infrared survey of the inner Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster, we have discovered and characterised a sample of 540 planetary-mass candidates with masses down to 0.6 Jupiter masses, demonstrating that there is indeed no sharp cut-off in the mass function. Furthermore, we find that 9% of the planetary mass objects are in wide binaries, a result that is highly unexpected and which challenges current theories of both star and planet formation.”
–Abstract, Jupiter Mass Binary Objects in the Trapezium Cluster, by Samuel G Pearson and Mark J McCaughrean

This paper has huge implications for where we will find life in the universe, so let me explore them.

WHY THIS IMPLIES LIFE WITHOUT STARS

The traditional assumption was that there were only two ways a planet could form: core accretion, and disk instability. Crucially, both of these were assumed to take place only in the swirling protoplanetary disk of gas and dust around a newly forming star.

Core accretion is the most popular model, with the most observational support. It proposes that an initial small, solid seed of dust and ice slowly grows by collecting (accreting) more material – including, eventually, a thick gas atmosphere, once the core is massive enough to gravitationally attract the gas.

With the disk instability model, a fairly large area of gas and dust in the protoplanetary disk grows unstable, and collapses, to directly form the entire planet in one go. The heavier elements (the dust) quickly settle to form the core, while the gas forms the atmosphere. (This model has less observational support, and, though it may well happen, is currently believed to be roughly an order of magnitude rarer. See PLANETARY FORMATION SCENARIOS REVISITED: CORE-ACCRETION VERSUS DISK INSTABILITY, by Matsuo, T., Shibai, H., Ootsubo, T, and Tamura, M.)

So this new paper goes on to outline how they saw a lot of star formation, as they expected to, and planetary disk formation around those stars, as they expected, and planets condensing out of those planetary disks, as they expected.

But they also saw large numbers of Jupiter-sized planets forming without any star. That is, condensing out of the gas were freestanding Jupiters not orbiting any star, not forming from a planetary disk around a star, just forming in open space. Given the traditional assumptions about planet formation, this was not expected. In fact, that's a severe understatement. This was a huge shock to the astronomers.

They had generally assumed there was a mass cut-off, below which such objects couldn't form, or could only form with difficulty, under unusual conditions (and thus rarely).

What they were now seeing simply didn't fit their model of planetary formation. And these independent, free-standing Jupiters-with-no-star were numerous. This wasn't just an isolated one-off, they found hundreds of them, in a relatively modest region of space. Plus, many of these starless Jupiters formed binaries: that is, two Jupiter-sized planets in orbit about each other. This shouldn’t happen!

“This has not been predicted at all. There are no existing theories where we would have expected these wide, free-floating planetary objects in these numbers.”

–Matthew Bate, head of the Astrophysics Group at the University of Exeter, quoted in Wired

Well, we know that stars often form in binaries (in pairs that orbit each other): so why are astronomers so surprised to find two Jupiters orbiting each other?

Because, yes, sure, massive stars commonly form binaries: but as stars grow smaller, binaries grow less and less common. For really massive stars (some of them 100 times more massive than our sun, and therefore 100,000 times more massive than Jupiter), the vast majority – between 70 and 90% – are in binary or multiple systems.

At the bottom of the scale, the smallest stars are brown dwarves – barely stars at all, as they can’t fuse hydrogen, only small amounts of super-easy-to-fuse deuterium. Thousands of times smaller than the most massive stars, brown dwarves are between just 0.075 times and 0.015 times the mass of our sun (but still between 15 and 75 times more massive than Jupiter) – and only 5 or 10% of the smallest of them form binaries. Also, the two stars in those binaries are usually really close together. So these Jupiter-sized planets, being far smaller than even the smallest stars, should be forming almost no binaries at all. Yet 9% of them are in binaries! And the two are really widely separated! So a rule that applies over four or five orders of magnitude breaks down once we get to this particular size.

The astronomers call these weird little Jupiter-sized guys by the current standard term, planetary-mass objects, or PMOs (and they christened the ones in binaries JuMBOs – Jupiter-mass binary objects). And they found hundreds of the little feckers, both single and binary, in just a small patch of the very first stellar nursery we've looked at through the new James Webb Space Telescope (the first telescope able to see them). Remember, we can only see the largest and most recently-formed ones, still glowing hot in the infrared, before they cool down. Many, many more such freestanding planets (or, if you are being picky, planetary-mass objects – we will return to this terminology problem later) are presumably also in that region – they've just cooled down too much for us to see, or they are really small.

It's therefore possible that freestanding planets might greatly outnumber planets formed around stars. If that generalizes across all stellar nurseries, and there's no reason to believe it won't, then the vast majority of large planets in our universe (and maybe small planets, too, though that’s less relevant to my argument) exist without stars.

MOST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE DOES NOT REQUIRE A STAR

If they go on to form icy moons… Well, if life is to be found chiefly in liquid water oceans beneath the surface of these icy moons, and if these icy moons are mostly orbiting planets that are not orbiting stars – then most life in the universe does not require a star. (I haven't seen anyone else point out this implication. But I can't be the first to have seen it, so please tell me if you know of an earlier mention, and I'll credit them here.)

And the bias against star-based life might be even more extreme than the raw number of planets-without-stars suggests.

HILL SPHERE BLUES

That's because the Hill sphere is the area around a planet where moons can be found – because within that sphere, the gravity of the planet is more powerful than that of the star the planet (and its moons) orbit. For Neptune’s Hill sphere, for example, we're talking a radius of one hundred and fifteen million kilometers. (That’s 0.77AU, or 0.77 times the average distance between the Sun and the Earth.) Any moon outside that limit will eventually be pulled free of Neptune by the sun.

But for free-floating planets with no nearby star, the Hill sphere would be much, MUCH larger. Moons could be waaaaay out from the planet, and still be in a stable orbit. Such planets could therefore support more moons, in their larger Hill sphere. (See my BRILLIANT illustration, above. While noting it is extremely simplified and not to scale.)

If this is the case – if most of the life in the universe does not require stars, but is instead in these starless planet-and-moon systems, each with an extra-large helping of moons – then we clearly need new terminology. A freestanding planet that is not orbiting a star, but is instead the gravitational centre of its own system, needs a different descriptive term than a planet orbiting a star. And “planetary-mass object” is

A) Too long

B) Pug-ugly, and

C) Not precise enough (as it can refer to planets, dwarf planets, planetary-mass satellites, free-floating planets ejected from a system, and sub-brown dwarfs).

THESE AREN’T ROGUE PLANETS

The traditional term for a planet that’s not orbiting a star is “rogue planet”; but this assumes the natural condition of a planet is orbiting a star, and to leave it is to “go rogue”: to become a rare outlier. And so “rogue planet” is still a useful term; it works for a planet that formed around a star, but has since been ripped away from it, and hurled into interstellar space – perhaps gravitationally sling-shotted out of its solar system by a larger planet. But “rogue planet” is totally inappropriate for worlds formed with no star to orbit in the first place. (Indeed, if most worlds are formed independent of any star, then it’s places like Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn that are the oddities, the outliers.) So we need new terms.

STANETS

I suggest we call these planets, formed independently of any star, “Stanets” – short for star-like planets. Star-like planets in that they are at the centre of a system, not orbiting it. If our sun is the centre of our solar system, and a star is the centre of a stellar system, and a planet is the centre of a planetary system (with the star which that system orbits offstage, but implied) – then stanets are the centre of a stanetary system.

PLOONS

And of course we also need another term for the moons (many of them icy) that orbit these star-like planets.

I suggest “ploons”; planet-like moons, because these moons essentially are the planets orbiting the central Jupiter-sized object.

So, much of life in our universe may exist without stars! It is found on “ploons” orbiting “stanets” – on planet-like moons orbiting star-like planets – in the dark spaces between the larger, less numerous, luminous stars.

BACK TO AN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF UNIVERSES

Let’s ground all this in the evolutionary theory of universes we are exploring here on The Egg and the Rock, where universes reproduce through black holes.

The three-stage model of cosmological natural selection argues that our universe has three stages of reproduction:

1. First, through an initial wave of direct-collapse supermassive black holes. Those supermassive black holes then dynamically generate galaxies of stars, as I’ve outlined here.

2. Those stars generate a second stage of reproductive success, by forming black holes at the end of their lives.

3. But the third wave of reproductive success is the largest, and it comes when intelligent lifeforms wield technologies to manufacture artificially small black holes (for maximally efficient energy production). More life = more black holes = more reproductive success for that universe.

Maximizing the production and distribution of life in our universe is therefore maximizing the reproductive success of the universe as a whole.

It is quite possible that exposed surface water oceans on rocky planets were once – in the evolutionary past, many generations of universe ago – the original way in which life was generated. The intelligent life which developed on those rocky planets ultimately optimised its energy production by building small technological black holes, which meant reproductive success for the universe as a whole.

But you can only get a tiny number of planets to generate life that way per star – that's a very, very small number of life-bearing worlds for a given mass. This is because most of the mass is caught up in the star, which can only produce (eventually, at the end of its life), a single (wastefully large) black hole.

Multiple icy moons would be more successful around planets orbiting stars – you're getting a lot more life and thus a lot more small black holes for the same amount of matter. But you’ve still got most of the mass of the system locked up in a star.

But once you're able to make large numbers of Jupiter-sized planets, efficiently delivering gravitational energy to large numbers of icy moons forming liquid water oceans – and those planets are no longer limited to roughly two or three per star – you get runaway reproductive success, a huge evolutionary breakthrough which would be conserved. A star’s worth of gas can instead make hundreds of free-standing Jupiters. Rather than one star, you get hundreds of stanets, and thousands of life-bearing ploons.

So our universe may be part of a slow evolutionary transition from universes where life was commonly produced on the surface of rocky worlds, to universes where life is more commonly produced in the liquid water oceans of icy moons, orbiting planets that may not even be orbiting stars.

You can see this as simply the latest stage in the long evolutionary history of universes, where, at each step, simple Darwinian evolution selects for those universes which produce the largest number of black holes (and thus offspring) per unit mass.

Remember, smaller black holes don't mean smaller offspring: in our universe, the positive mass energy and the negative gravitational energy net out to zero. You could build our universe out of, essentially, nothing. So a black hole, no matter how small, can generate a full-size universe.

THE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION MOVES UNIVERSES TOWARDS STANETS AND PLOONS

At stage one, the universe is maxing out on simple direct-collapse supermassive black holes.

But once you have the breakthrough to stage two (universes capable of making both direct-collapse supermassive black holes, AND smaller stellar-collapse black holes), it makes evolutionary sense to use less mass making the supermassive black holes, and reserve more mass for making stars, and thus (smaller, and far more numerous) stellar-mass black holes. Overall, you are making way more black holes per unit of mass, and thus are more reproductively successful.

And once you have the breakthrough into stage three (universes capable of making direct-collapse supermassive black holes, AND smaller stellar-collapse black holes, AND much smaller technologically-produced black holes), it makes evolutionary sense to use less mass making stars, and reserve more mass for making free-standing planets and their icy moons – stanets and ploons. You get less stellar mass black holes, but WAY more technologically-produced small black holes.

In other words, at stage three, you are no longer maximising stars, or even solar systems with planets; you are maximising the number of environments in which intelligent technology-wielding life can evolve. And that’s stanets and their life-friendly ploons.

So my prediction is that stanets and ploons will turn out to vastly outnumber – by at least an order of magnitude, and probably much more – the normal planets-and-their-moons orbiting stars.

Exciting times!

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

An evolved universe, with the basic parameters of matter fine-tuned by that evolution to generate conditions suitable for life, doesn't mean you will find life in all these liquid water oceans on all these icy moons, and ploons. Evolution is a messy business, as my grumpy friend the biologist Yogi Jaeger constantly reminds me. And evolved life is exuberant, excessive, wasteful. Most seeds do not become plants; most plants do not make it to their maximum size. Most liquid water oceans will not generate intelligent life. But enough of them will.

Our evolved universe will never resemble a row of perfectly tended plants. It will be more like an unkempt grove of trees and bushes and weeds. Some plants will thrive, some wither. Some will have enough heat, and shade, and water, and nutrients, some too much, or too little. But overall, even though at any given moment half of the trees, the bushes, the weeds are dead or dying, the grove as a whole will thrive; life will thrive.

CIVILIZATIONS THAT CANNOT LOOK UP AT THE STARS

Icy moons may also provide a partial answer to the Fermi paradox (“If there are aliens… where are they?”) They are under the ice, evolving away far more slowly than us, at far lower temperatures, but in far greater safety. But their sheltered development raises an interesting possibility.

Humans have been tormented by the idea of a larger universe from day one. Just look straight up, and you will see either the sun, or the moon, stars and planets. More than that: Shooting stars! Comets! Supernovas! (OK, supernovae!) We may not have had any idea what they were, or how far away, but we knew there was a lot going on, and we have always dreamed of going out there: exploring.

An advanced civilisation that developed in a single, vast, subsurface ocean, beneath a crust of ice twenty or fifty or a hundred miles thick, may never even conceptualise a larger universe – an elsewhere – let alone explore it.

But that’s moving into the realm of speculative philosophy. Another post, for another day.

WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE

I can't end this without shifting focus one more level. Everything we've talked about here is dependent on one strange fact that we are so used to, we have stopped seeing it as odd: water expands when it freezes. This is true of very, very few substances in nature. Plus, those few are (apart from silicon) usually rare (germanium, antimony), and usually don’t expand by much, maybe 3%. Water expands a LOT, by 9%, when it turns to ice. Ice is therefore much lighter than water; ice floats. Liquid water thus freezes from the top down – yeah, even though warm water rises. It’s very, very, very odd behaviour for a liquid, and it makes life possible here on Earth, but also on those icy moons.

Instead, when things get cold – too cold for water-based life – a layer moves into place, on the surface of the water, to protect the life deep within it from that cold. To protect the water itself from the loss of more heat. If it didn't expand – if it contracted on freezing, like the vast majority of substances – ponds, lakes, oceans, and icy moons would all freeze from the bottom up, and everything would die.

The liquid oceans on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter (and an incalculable number of ploons orbiting stanets), are only possible because the basic parameters of matter are fine-tuned such that the two hydrogens and an oxygen that form liquid water take up more space, not less, when they stop randomly wandering about, and lock into the stable lattice of ice.

Mainstream science can describe what happens extremely well – but it can't explain why it happens, because the question is meaningless in a one-shot universe with random, arbitrary qualities. Even though that fact is so immensely consequential. Even though that single unlikely fact unlocks all the possibilities of life.

It's worth pondering why chemistry does that. Why water does that. Why our universe does that.

Which leads to my last thought:

HOW DID I GET HERE?

Think about which is more likely: that all this shit just happened once, out of nowhere, 13.8 billion years ago, by mistake – and everything just happened to arbitrarily and accidentally interlock in such a way that stars, galaxies, planets, life, intelligence, and technology all emerged one after the other, wow, what a surprise, what are the odds, hey? Or that our specific universe, bound inside its little bubble of expanding spacetime, came about, step-by-step, generation by generation, through the only mechanism we know of that can lead from an initial membrane-bound system of utter simplicity to a later, different, membrane-bound system of unfathomable complexity (given enough time and enough iterations, enough generations). That mechanism is (Darwinian) evolution.

OK, feel free to share this post with anyone you think would enjoy it. That really helps spread these fascinating, underappreciated ideas.

If you want to read more about the theory of cosmological natural selection, here’s a link to a good history of the idea, and here's a link to my take on it.

If you want to read about my recent extension of the theory so that it makes predictions, here’s another link.

If you're interested in icy moons, and the recent discovery of phosphorus on Enceladus, here is a link.

And if you want to stay involved in this conversation, subscribe (it's free), and I'll email you every new post as I write it.

Oh, and have a great 2025.

Comments welcome…

EXTREMELY SHORT VERSION

I’ve received funding from two interesting sources; I’ve attended a fascinating unconference in Dublin, and spoken at it; I’ve spoken at another, more formal, complexity science conference in the UK; I’ve consequently met a bunch of interesting new people, and read a bunch of interesting new papers and articles; as a result of all the above, I’ve had a bunch of interesting new ideas; I’ve recorded a couple of interesting podcasts; I’ve gone camping with my interesting family; and I’ve written significantly more of the actual book, plus an EPIC post on structure formation in the early universe that is almost ready to go.

It’s all been very interesting.

SLIGHTLY LESS SHORT, BUT STILL PRETTY SHORT, VERSION:

FUNDING

The Egg and the Rock recently received funding from two philanthropic organisations, Emergent Ventures and O’Shaughnessy Ventures. In both cases, these are no-strings-attached grants to help me keep writing the book, and to keep explaining, exploring, and expanding on the theory of cosmological natural selection here in public on Substack.

EMERGENT VENTURES

Emergent Ventures is run out of the Mercatus Centre, located in George Mason University in Virginia (right beside Washington DC). It’s a grant and fellowship program, focused on "moon-shot" ideas, set up by the economist Tyler Cowen in 2018. (He also launched Fast Grants in April 2020, as a spin-off of Emergent Ventures, to provided rapid funding to scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. Raised over $50 million, and awarded 260 grants.) I’m kind of fascinated by Tyler – he’s an important, active node in a bunch of the most interesting, future-leaning American networks – and I think he and his work should be better known, so I’ll give you a brief bio of the guy.

TYLER COWEN

Tyler has run the Marginal Revolution economics blog for over twenty years, posting daily (without, as far as I can tell, a single day off in that time); he also hosts the Conversations with Tyler podcast. Typical guests: Noam Chomsky, Joseph Stiglitz, Lydia Davis, Peter Thiel, Peter Singer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lazarus Lake, Rick Rubin, Margaret Atwood, Ken Burns, Claudia Goldin, Sam Altman, Fuchsia Dunlop, Tobi Lütke, and a homeless guy called Alexander the Grate – so, an eclectic set of interviews with some strong personalities. (Yes, “typical” was a joke. And no, I don’t expect you to know all those names.) He’s written or co-written over 20 books, including The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, Average is Over, Modern Principles of Economics (with Alex Tabarrok), In Praise of Commercial Culture, and most recently (co-authored with Daniel Gross), Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World.

This all makes Tyler basically one of the most respected (and idiosyncratic) talent scouts out there, and so it’s a real pleasure to have gotten these ideas through his filters. It reassures me that I’m onto something. (He reckons there is a 30% chance that I am right, which is pretty good odds for such an unorthodox idea from such a rigorous thinker. I think there’s a 70%, maybe 80% chance I am right, but obviously I’m unbelievably biased.)

O’SHAUGHNESSY VENTURES

O’Shaughnessy Ventures is an even more recent entry to the field of philanthropy, disbursing its first fellowships and grants only last year. It funds a nice eclectic mixture of arts, science, and tech projects – including ones as hard to categorise as mine.

JIM O’SHAUGHNESSY

It was set up by Jim O’Shaughnessy (yes, a name so Irish it could only be American), that most intriguing of types; a successful algorithmic trader and hedge fund manager heavily influenced by Robert Anton Wilson. (Yes, the same Robert Anton Wilson I often quote here – “I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions” / “All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense” / “Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong” – and who greatly influenced my own intellectual growth, such as it has thus far been – the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, author of Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising, and Quantum Psychology, and the guy who may or may not have had conversations, over several months, with aliens from Sirius, the Dog Star.) Jim himself has written several bestselling books on investment, such as What Works on Wall Street, been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, and his daughter is a successful writer, which is always a good sign.

O’Shaughnessy Ventures’ mission statement is the nicely Wilsonian “To help you go from good to great to “Wow, I never saw that coming!””

CONFERENCES

Emergent Ventures Unconference, Dublin, Ireland

As a result of getting an Emergent Ventures grant, I attended the Emergent Ventures Unconference in Dublin in August. There’s a very good account of that unconference here, by the playwright Ben Yeoh.

I gave a talk on the current state of cosmological natural selection as a theory. It seemed to go down well. Lots of interested questions.

Conference on Complex Systems 2024, Exeter, UK

I was invited to give a talk at the Conference on Complex Systems 2024. The conference was originally going to be held in Tel Aviv, but had to be moved for obvious reasons. (It ended up split between Exeter and London.) In the end, I wasn’t able to attend in person, but I gave my talk, on the current healthy state of cosmological natural selection, by Zoom. It may end up online at some point, in which case I’ll post a link. I’m very grateful to Georgi Georgiev (the physicist, not the footballer), Clément Vidal, and John Smart for the invitation.

A BACKLOG OF IDEAS

As a result of all this stimulating conversation and interaction, the past couple of months have generated a significant backlog of new ideas. I’m not sure how best to clear them; the way I normally write posts is waaaaay too slow to deal with all of them as individual full-length posts. So, I may experiment with some very short, scrappy posts over the next while, to clear that backlog. Just the gist of each raw idea.

I am, however, working on one long and ambitious new post that has consumed the last two months. It pulls together some major, non-obvious implications of cosmological natural selection, it is inspired by this extremely important new paper in Nature, “Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web”, and it’s called The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe. I hope to get it finished soon (but I’ve been saying that to myself, as I labour on draft after draft, for weeks).

INTERESTING PODCASTS

I recently recorded a 90 minute conversation with the playwright Ben Yeoh. It covers my entire career (from fronting Toasted Heretic, through writing novels, and children’s books, and the ending to Minecraft, to now), but with an emphasis on my recent work here on The Egg and the Rock. Ben is a fascinating guy. His plays include Lemon Love and Yellow Gentleman; he co-wrote and performed (with David Finnegan) Thinking Bigly: A Guide to Saving the World; he translated the 14th century Japanese Noh play, Nakamitsu, into English, etc. And he’s a great host.

I also recorded an episode of Infinite Loops, the podcast hosted by Jim O’Shaughnessy of O’Shaughnessy Ventures. This episode concentrated, even more so than Ben’s, on cosmological natural selection. Jim’s a big fan of scientific heretics and original thinkers (he’s interviewed Lisa Feldman Barrett, Scott Aaronson, Rupert Sheldrake and others), so we got on extremely well. It should go live sometime in the next month or two.

I’ll probably post the transcripts of both of these, with the YouTube videos embedded, as separate posts. (Part of clearing my backlog.)

HOLIDAY!

Oh yeah, I also went on holiday for a week in August, like a normal person. (I didn’t go on holidays for many years, because for many years I was a fucked-up writer with no money, a bad attitude, and a severely unbalanced life. Not the serene spirit in the body of Adonis you see before you today, calmly juggling the many responsibilities of life with the balance and control of the Buddha with an MBA.) Went camping in the Netherlands with my wonderful wife Solana, our splendid son Arlo, and my delightful daughter Sophie. Cycled everywhere. Had a blast. Sunshine. Ice cream. So much cheese... Holidays are marvellous! Why did no one tell me! (Oh, wait, they did. I just didn’t listen.)

A ZOOM ASK-ME-ANYTHING FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS

I am also intensely grateful to my paid subscribers, over a hundred of whom are still hanging in there. (All my free subscribers should be grateful too! By funding the writing, those paid subscribers are helping me keep these posts free for everyone else.) So, I want to invite all you excellent, long-suffering paid subscribers to a Zoom call (probably on Sunday, December 15th) where you can ask me anything, or indeed tell me anything, and I can update you in more detail on everything that has been happening behind the scenes. You will get an email later this week, with a Zoom invite. (I can’t afford to host potentially 8,000 people on a Zoom call, so this is just for paid subscribers; but I appreciate all my free subscribers too! And yes, if you become a paid subscriber in the next couple of days, you’ll get the invite.) I'll probably make this a regular thing – roughly monthly – as I feel I've been taking my paid subscribers too much for granted, and that's bad for my soul. Also, more selfishly, I would value more feedback, as I work on the book version of these ideas…

I also hugely appreciate anyone who paid, say, for the first year back in 2022, simply as a gesture of support, or because they liked my other writing or whatever, and then cancelled. It was hugely helpful at the time, and I’d be happy to have you on the Zoom call too. Just answer this email saying you’d like to attend and I’ll add you in.

I’m going to schedule the call for a Sunday morning US west coast, so lunchtime East Coast, and evening in Europe and Africa. This means the majority of my paid subscribers can attend. (I realise this makes things rather late in India, while Australia and New Zealand get totally shafted, but that’s what happens when you live on the far side of a round planet. Upside, you can sit out World War Three. Downside, you can only hear me at 3 in the morning. Tradeoffs, man. Everything is tradeoffs.)

THE STATE OF THE BOOK

I have also, over the summer, been quietly writing the book version of all this, to the great relief of my long-suffering agent, Charlie Campbell. This led to a rather quiet couple of months on the Substack, but those early chapters should eventually be posted here (once I’ve finished polishing them); so think of it as delayed gratification, which is good for your character.

There you go! That was the short update! Remember, the big new post (The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe) will be along sometime in the next month; watch out for it. It has some ideas that I think are both strong and original, and really move the theory forward. Meanwhile, a couple of, ah, interesting shorter posts may pop up…

OK, be nice to each other.

Talk soon…

It’s all about polymetallic nodules, so I’d better explain what they are first.

BALLS!

Polymetallic nodules are found on the deep seafloor here on Earth, and look like roundish, roughish rocks. Basically, balls. They range in size from too-small-to-see, through a small pea, to a large potato. They form slowly and naturally (the process can take millions of years), through straightforward, mostly non-biological, chemical processes, layer by layer. The various layers are formed from different metals – mostly manganese and iron, but also cobalt, nickel, sodium – so if you cut one open, it would look like a metal version of a gobstopper.  And they cover millions of square kilometres of sea floor. You can find up to 15 kilograms of these nodules per square meter.

This new paper outlines how some of those polymetallic nodules, a couple of miles beneath the waves, out in the middle of the Pacific, seem to be producing oxygen.  This was, to put it mildly, not anticipated. This was so not anticipated, in fact, that the team of scientists kept sending the sensors back to the manufacturers, because mainstream theories have always assumed oxygen could not be produced several miles down, as there's no sunlight to allow for photosynthesis. And photosynthesis (by plants and algae) is how all our oxygen is usually produced, whether on land, or in the shallow surface waters of the seas, where sunlight penetrates.

“I basically told my students, just put the sensors back in the box. We’ll ship them back to the manufacturer and get them tested because they’re just giving us gibberish. And every single time the manufacturer came back: ‘They’re working. They’re calibrated.’”

– Andrew Sweetman, head of the seafloor ecology and biogeochemistry research group at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, on CNN

So, this really is an astounding discovery.  The production of oxygen by these manganese and iron and cobalt and nickel nodules seems to be, as far as we can tell so far, the result of a purely chemical reaction.  But that purely chemical oxygen production is enabling biological life at these extreme oceanic depths.

Here’s a link to a good report from Science Daily.

And here are the juciest quotes…

"The polymetallic nodules that produce this oxygen contain metals such as cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium and manganese -- which are all critical elements used in batteries," said [Franz] Geiger, who co-authored the study. Geiger is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and member of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Energy and Sustainability

"When we first got this data, we thought the sensors were faulty because every study ever done in the deep sea has only seen oxygen being consumed rather than produced," [Andrew] Sweetman said. "We would come home and recalibrate the sensors, but, over the course of 10 years, these strange oxygen readings kept showing up.

"We decided to take a back-up method that worked differently to the optode sensors we were using. When both methods came back with the same result, we knew we were onto something ground-breaking and unthought-of."

To investigate this hypothesis, Sweetman shipped several pounds of the polymetallic nodules, which were collected from the ocean floor, to Geiger's laboratory at Northwestern. Sweetman also visited Northwestern last December, spending a week in Geiger's lab.

Just 1.5 volts -- the same voltage as a typical AA battery -- is enough to split seawater. Amazingly, the team recorded voltages of up to 0.95 volts on the surface of single nodules. And when multiple nodules clustered together, the voltage can be much more significant, just like when batteries are connected in a series.

"It appears that we discovered a natural 'geobattery,'" Geiger said. "These geobatteries are the basis for a possible explanation of the ocean's dark oxygen production."

–Science Daily. (Materials provided by Northwestern University. Original written by Amanda Morris.)

THE GEOSPHERE ENABLES THE BIOSPHERE

This is a beautiful example of something that we're going to see again and again, when we examine the totality of a planet like Earth, and treat it as an evolved system: the geosphere actively enables the biosphere. They are inextricably entwined. In particular, inorganic chemistry complexifies over time in such a way as to create the conditions for organic chemistry. Put more simply, rock chemistry generates the conditions for egg chemistry.

It’s all one integrated developmental path. And I think you're going to see this even more in the case of icy moons: deep under their frozen crust, in their liquid water oceans, the geosphere is going to enable the biosphere, in ways that will surprise those scientists who are not expecting a system fine-tuned (by evolution at the level of universes) for the production of life. 

We  often call the rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo, south-east Asia, etc, the lungs of the world, because they produce the oxygen that animals and birds and insects and popes and peasants and poets need to survive. Trees, which self-assemble by pulling carbon out of the air, provide that function on land.  Their roots take in water (H2O), while their leaves take in carbon dioxide (CO2), and use the energy from sunlight to crack the chemical bonds between the carbon and the oxygen. The carbon, hydrogen, and some oxygen get used to make glucose (C6H12O6), which feeds and grows the tree. There’s a lot of oxygen left over, and that is excreted. (6CO2 + 6H2O + dear old sunlight = C6H12O6, a delicious glucose molecule + 6O2, a lot of oxygen left over.) But now we have found purely chemical, non-biological, non-carbon based producers of oxygen, in the deepest depths of the oceans of Earth.

THE DEEP SEA HAS BATTERY-POWERED LUNGS

The deep sea has lungs.  They produce enough oxygen for life to flourish, and they do it without sunlight, in deep water, purely chemically. Sure, most of the oxygen down there still comes from biological activity miles above, dissolved into the shallow surface waters, and carried into the depths as it cools and falls. But hey, this new source is a radical discovery.

The implications for life in the liquid water oceans, under the surface of icy moons, are obvious, and enormous.  So I'm going to predict now, with medium confidence (and a couple of caveats, to follow) that we may well ultimately discover similar polymetallic nodules, producing oxygen through similar chemical processes, on the warm seafloors of the liquid water oceans under the frozen crusts of icy moons. 

The same sea floor volcanic vents that melt the ice to make those liquid water oceans will also provide the manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, et cetera, that these nodules require. 

Obviously, this requires the icy moons to have rocky cores with a fairly high degree of manganese, iron, nickel, and cobalt content. (OK, maybe not much cobalt.)  I think this will turn out to be the case for a high percentage of icy moons.

As I'm arguing in a series of posts, I think liquid water oceans on icy moons will turn out to be the commonest homes for life in this universe.  And the biosphere in such oceans would have to be powered, not by sunlight, but by the gravitational energy of the planet tugging on the moon’s core, thus keeping it molten. Which is great, but… those liquid water oceans are under a mile or two of solid ice, incredibly far from the sun. Zero sunlight down there. No photosynthesis...

So polymetallic nodules could potentially solve the oxygen problem, performing the function photosynthetic plants do on Earth.

A CHANGE OF HAT

Okay, that was all written wearing my positively-charged optimist’s hat. Now let me put on my negatively-charged pessimist’s hat, and lay out some possible problems in transferring this finding to icy moons.

Quite a bit of research has been done into how these polymetallic nodules seem to form. And on Earth they need a decent amount of free oxygen to form in the first place – they are made by a redox (reduction and oxidation) reaction, and they are full of metal oxides (where the metal has combined with oxygen). Decaying biological life provides some of that oxygen. Oxygen from the surface, descending in cold water, provides some more of it. And that oxygen was provided by life – trees, algae, cyanobacteria, other phytoplankton, seaweeds... So, on our planet, in our era, those nodules can't build themselves until there is already free oxygen – and life –present. That's fine once there are a lot of nodules already there, generating electricity, cracking seawater, and making oxygen. But you can't use them as the original source of oxygen. Photosynthesis still performs that function.

But it’s still possible that nodules might form, in the absence of oxygen. (Remember, there’s almost no free oxygen in the air or sea before life takes off, because oxygen is so reactive it gets locked up immediately. Without a source to replenish it – a tree, algae – it all goes away, fast.)

The earliest nodules, in the absence of oxygen, wouldn’t make themselves out of layers of metallic oxides; they would instead combine with sulphur, to form metallic sulphides. That’s because sulphur is abundant in the early oceans, and is structurally similar to oxygen, thus forming similar bonds. Life on icy moons, like life on earth, will probably be sulphur-based before it transitions to (more efficient, but hard to unlock) oxygen.

My guess, then, is that these sulphide-rich nodules on icy moons will be part of an early sulphur-based ecosystem. But if those sulphide-rich nodules can crack seawater (though probably less efficiently than the later oxide-rich nodules), they can slowly help life make the switch to oxygen. The free oxygen they produce initially will not be available to make nodules (or feed new, improved oxygen-eating bacteria!) for a long time, as dissolved iron in the water will eat up any free oxygen immediately, to form iron oxide (rust). Something similar happened on earth, for a long, loooooong, time, as the earliest oxygen-making forms of life (probably cyanobacteria) simply fed their oxygen to the plentiful iron in the ocean. (It rained rust in every ocean on Earth for hundreds of millions of years: the resulting Banded Iron Formations – dark red sedimentary rocks – are hundreds of meters, even up to a kilometre, deep, all over the world). But when the iron levels in the oceans of the icy moons drop enough, the nodules will switch from a sulphide regime to an oxide regime, and to more efficient oxygen production. And life can transition, on those icy moons, to oxygen and away from sulphur, as it did on earth. There is a evolved chemical logic to life...

This is highly speculative, and I wouldn't bet my house on it (if I had a house), but I think we will see something like that. (Chemists, give me feedback!)

Meanwhile, the deep ocean floor on Earth has millions of square kilometres covered in a thick forest of naturally-produced batteries, quietly cracking seawater into hydrogen and oxygen, deep down where the sun don't shine. As I have said before, and I'll say again: it's always more complicated. There's always more orderly structure. (Rocks turn out to be batteries!) There's always more meaning.

This may inspire me to finish my two other posts on icy moons, which I have in my stack of unfinished posts. Fun times!

OK, I am off on holiday in the morning, camping for a week with my delightful family, and largely offline. (I’m finishing this while knackered, just before I go to bed, so excuse typos.) Hope you are having a good summer, and I will see you again soooooon...

Instead, it occurred to him, with a shock, that probably no mineralogist knew the answer. But not only that – it then occurred to him that no mineralogist had ever even thought to find out the answer. Not only that – he realised that mineralogists hadn’t thought to ask that question about any mineral. It just wasn’t something you did, in mineralogy. Not only that – he realised you couldn’t really do serious research into the origins of life without these answers.

And so he spent the next year recruiting a crack team of mineralogists, geologists, geobiologists, geochemists, and experts on everything from paleotectonics to metamorphic petrology to meteorites – (Dominic Papineau! Wouter Bleeker! John Ferry! Tim McCoy! Dimitri Sverjensky! Robert Downs! Hexiong Yang!)… and they wrote the classic paper Mineral Evolution, which tells the tale of how our Earth started out as a cloud of dust and gas containing not much more than a dozen minerals, and ended up as it is now, with nearly six thousand different minerals. (For comparison, we know of only a hundred minerals on the Earth’s moon; that’s ‘cause there’s no water, no plate tectonics, no weather, no life.)

Of course, when Robert uses the term “evolution” in that paper, he doesn’t mean Darwinian evolution – rocks don’t reproduce, they transform – but he does mean a rich, directional process leading to increasing complexity, stability, and order – as you will see in his fascinating guest post below.

That paper has been of huge benefit to me, as I try to chart the developmental process of an evolved (in the Darwinian sense) universe – particularly the chemical logic that smoothly leads from geosphere to biosphere on suitable worlds.

More recently, he was co-author of a paper with another of my favourite people, the brilliant young astrobiologist and planetary scientist Michael L. Wong. That paper (by Michael L. Wong, Carol E. Cleland, Daniel Arend Jr., Stuart Bartlett, H. James Cleaves II, Heather Demarest, Anirudh Prabhu, Jonathan I. Lunine, and Robert Hazen), On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems, moved Hazen’s initial ideas on mineral evolution up a level, to create a more general theory of the development of structured complexity and order in our universe. And that paper has had a remarkable impact; it’s already being cited widely in the scientific world, but it’s also being talked about by normal human beings; here’s coverage in The Guardian, Reuters, Salon, Vice…

It has touched a nerve, and sent a twitch through the whole culture – and I’m not at all surprised.

Essentially, Robert Hazen and I are exploring exactly the same phenomenon from different sides. He is operating inside this specific universe, pointing out the way in which it develops, step-by-step, in structured, orderly complexity over time. I am operating outside this specific universe, explaining how the Darwinian evolution of universes can lead to exactly that rich developmental outcome, that self-complexification, which he is describing.  (He would tend to use the word “evolution”, of course, where I say “development”; but, again, he doesn’t mean Darwinian evolution. We are actually agreeing with each other pretty closely here, although the terminology can sometimes make that hard to see.) 

Anyway, we’ve been emailing these ideas back and forth for a couple of years. Recently he sent me a link to a short new video he’d made, which gives the essence of the Wong/Cleland/Arend/Bartlett/Cleaves/Demarest/Prabhu/Lunine/Hazen paper On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.

“Here is the latest from our end. It's too short (7 minutes) and breezy; lacks nuance, as well as important parts of our arguments. But it's out there for people to bounce against.”

(From Bob’s email.)

He’s too modest; this is a great little explainer for a general audience. And if you like it, you can go and read the full paper.

 I asked him if I could put up the video and its transcript here, as a guest post (with my comments), because I think it’s a remarkably good fit with what I’m trying to do at The Egg and the Rock. It gives a clear view of the same problem (explaining the extreme self-complexification of our universe) from a different angle. He said, sure.

So, here you go. Enjoy.

THE VIDEO:

I recommend you watch this. Only seven minutes, and very nicely edited!  Still, I know lots of you prefer to read, or find it easier to take in information through text rather than video, so the transcript (with a couple of screenshots, to help make some points clearer, plus several extremely lengthy notes from me) is below the video.

THE TRANSCRIPT:

Robert Hazen, sitting in a chair, devilishly handsome, looking you straight in the eye:

I have to make a confession here. I have to be honest. We could be wrong. We could be spectacularly wrong. But it's also possible that science is missing a profound truth about the cosmos. We have these 10 or so laws of nature, only one of which currently has an arrow of time. That's the second law of thermodynamics, the increase in entropy—it's disorder; it's decay.

BOB AGAIN:

We all grow old. We all die. But the second law doesn't explain why things evolve; why life emerges from non-life. You look around, and you see flowers bloom and trees blossom and birds sing. It seems like all of those things are counter to the idea of disorder. In fact, it's a kind of ordering of nature.

So let me tell you what we think: We think there's a missing law, a second arrow of time that describes this increase in order, and we think it has to do with an increase in information. So there are two possibilities. We could just be wrong. We could be terribly wrong, dramatically wrong. But I think, if we're wrong, we're wrong in a very interesting way. And I think, if we're right, it's profoundly important. 

MY NOTE: I don’t think he’s wrong. But I do think the missing law, the second arrow of time, comes from, or perhaps it’s better to say operates, OUTSIDE our specific universe. It’s the Darwinian evolution of universes – which ultimately, after enough generations, leads to an extremely fine-tuned universe like ours, where the basic parameters of matter have been so finely adjusted by evolution as to lead to a sophisticated developmental process inside the lifetime of this (highly evolved!) universe.

That’s analogous to how the fine-tuning of DNA, over many generations, ultimately leads to a sophisticated developmental process in an egg, so that it develops into a chicken, or a giraffe, or a human being.

And that’s what leads to this extraordinarily unlikely-looking self-complexification – this sprint straight up the cliff of entropy, from hot gas to galaxies to planetary systems to biospheres to intelligent creatures turning matter into technologies – which Bob and his colleagues rightly describe as an increase in information, and then attempt to explain from within our single universe.

But let’s get back to Bob, because he’s about to dig deeper into what he means by evolution, in particular the evolution of minerals – and it’s a tremendously useful insight, which fits in perfectly with my own approach here. I’m pretty sure, by the way, that we are are both right. The Darwinian evolution of universes enables and informs the non-Darwinian evolution of chemicals that he talks about here – because the characteristics of the elements have themselves been formed, and fine-tuned, to do the things he describes, by evolution at the level of universes. (Side note: Holy crap, do we ever need a new vocabulary or agreed terminology of some kind, to keep all these different definitions, and levels, of evolution clear and distinct, so we can understand each other, because at the moment it’s unbelievably messy.) Take it away Bob…

I'm Bob Hazen. I'm a Staff Scientist at the Earth and Planets Laboratory of Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C. I do mineralogy, astrobiology. I love science. We think that, for some reason, there's been a missing second arrow of time. And that arrow has to do with an increase of information, an increase in order, an increase of patterning that goes side by side with the arrow of increasing disorder and increasing chaos, entropy.

The core of everything we've been thinking about, in terms of the missing law, is evolution. When I say the word "evolution," you immediately think of Darwin, but this idea of selection goes much, much beyond Darwin and life. It applies to the evolution of atoms. It applies to the evolution of minerals. It applies to the evolution of planets and atmospheres and oceans. Evolution, which we see as being an increase in diversity, of patterning, in complexity of systems through time.

And so the question is, "Well, what is evolution?" Evolution is simply selection for function. And this applies to every kind of system. Now, in life, you select for organisms that can survive long enough that they can reproduce and have offspring that will pass on their characteristics. That's what Darwin said, and that's one very important example of selection for function. But, in the mineral world, you select for organizations, of assemblies, of structures of atoms that persist, that can last billions of years even in new environments.

They don't break down. They don't dissolve. They don't weather away. It's very analogous to biological evolution, but it's different in detail. We think there's a missing law—it's a law of evolution. And, if there is a law, it has to be quantitative. It has to have a metric. You have to be able to measure something. And what we've zeroed in on is a fascinating concept about information but not just information in general, something called 'functional information.'

Let me see if I can explain this to you 'cause it took me a while to figure it out myself. Imagine a system, an evolving system that has the potential to form vast numbers of different configurations. Let's say they're atoms to make minerals, and you have dozens of different mineral-forming elements, and they can arrange themselves in all different ways. And 99.99999999—I can keep going—percent of those configurations won't work. They will fall apart. They'll never form. A tiny, tiny fraction makes a stable mineral, and you end up with a few stable minerals and lots of rejects.

Now, all you need to do is think about that fraction. If it's one in a hundred trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion possibilities that's stable, then you can represent that fraction as information. And because it's such a tiny, tiny fraction, you need a lot of bits of information to do that—that's functional information. Evolution is simply an increase in functional information because, as you select for better and better outcomes, you select for minerals that are more and more stable. You select for living things that can swim. They can fly. They can see.

You need more information, and each step of the evolutionary ladder leads you to increasing functional information. So, our law, our missing law, the second arrow of time is called the 'Law of increasing functional information.' And that's the parallel arrow of time that we think is out there that we want to understand. 

MY NOTE: I love this, but would, of course, describe it slightly differently – or rather I would interpret what we are seeing here differently. There IS a rise in functional information over time: that rise in functional information over time is of the same kind, and for the same reason, as the rise in functional information in a fertilised egg over time. A Darwinian evolutionary process, outside of, and preceding, the lifetime of the individual egg (or universe) has fine-tuned the genes (or basic parameters of matter) so that their interaction, as time unfolds, will automatically lead to the building out of complexity, and a corresponding rise in functional information.

In each case, you end up with a complex, structured, interacting, system-of-systems, with ever smaller, yet more complex, systems nested inside each other. An egg leads to a body, containing organs, made up of cells, packed with organelles. The Big Bang leads to a universe, containing galaxies, made up of solar systems, packed with biospheres that generate intelligent tool-building creatures. (And if you’re new here, and want to know how those things, those nested levels of increasing complexity, could make a universe more reproductively successful, and could thus have been selected for, read this, or this, or this.)

You can describe it as “finding a law inside the universe”; but it’s more clearly understood as “finding the consequences of a law that has operated across many preceding generations of universe, outside this universe, leading to this observable outcome inside this universe”.

OK, back to Bob!

BOB AGAIN:

The idea of increasing functional information has a really profound implication. Think about the functional information of a coffee cup; you might be holding one right now.

You have a bunch of atoms, and those atoms could be in trillions of trillions of trillions of different configurations, but only a tiny fraction of those configurations will hold a cup of coffee. Now, think about a coffee cup as a paperweight. I know you've used a coffee cup as a paperweight. We all have, and it's pretty good at that, but you can make a better paperweight. And a coffee cup makes a terrible screwdriver. So think about this: We're saying that the coffee cup has value as a coffee cup. It has some value as a paperweight, but it has no value as a screwdriver—that's contextual.

So this is why the second arrow of time is difficult for science because it's saying there's something in the natural world that is not absolute. It's contextual. It depends on what your purpose is. It depends on what your function is. If it's true, what we're saying is there's something in the Universe that is increasing order, it's increasing complexity, and it isn't doing this in a random way. It's selecting for function. And if it is, if you're selecting for function, it means that there almost seems to be—can I use the word "purpose?"

Do minerals have a purpose? Do atmospheres have a purpose? Does life have a purpose? To me, there's something real there, and the old way of thinking of a single arrow of time no longer rings true to me.

–Robert Hazen

FINAL NOTE FROM ME:

OK; that’s the end of the transcript. Let me sum up my thoughts: Bob is totally right. (And Michael Wong, and the whole gang)  “There's something in the Universe that is increasing order, it's increasing complexity, and it isn't doing this in a random way. It's selecting for function.” 

Yeah, there is. AND I KNOW WHAT IT IS.

OK, let me briefly recap the theory I’ve been exploring, and expanding – Cosmological Natural Selection – and show how well it complements, and explains, Bob’s words.

COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION, UPDATED: A RECAP

Remember; a black hole is a singularity, a point of maximum compression, where matter has collapsed under its own gravity so fucking hard that it has left its parent universe. Nothing, not even light, is coming back from there. It’s travelled beyond all our current theories; even the mathematics of General Relativity breaks down inside a black hole and starts to vomit infinities. A black hole has bent the spacetime around it so hard, it has budded off. It’s gone. Bye bye.

And remember, each new “child” universe is a brand new spacetime, which comes into existence in a Big Bang, expanding from a singularity – a point of maximum compression. My argument (which is based on Lee Smolin’s argument, which is developed from John Wheeler’s argument) is that an expanding-from-a-singularity Big Bang baby-universe (like ours) is simply the next step, the other side, of the contracting singularity which is a black hole in a “parent” universe. And each such new universe is defined by roughly 27 basic parameters of matter. That’s its rule-set (which you can think of as vaguely analogous to its genes).

The 27 basic parameters of matter in each new child universe can vary very subtly, very slightly, from those in its parent. That variation makes it more or less likely to produce more or less black holes (to be more or less reproductively successful); and so Darwinian evolution inevitably follows. Over enough generations, even if you started with the most simple blob-of-glop universe that could only collapse directly into a couple of black holes, you will eventually (and this process can be completely blind, completely random; this is just the beautiful, and relentlessly bountiful, logic of evolution), eventually fine-tune your way to universes which are far more reproductively successful – which produce HUGE numbers of black holes – and anything that leads to such increasing numbers of black holes will be conserved. Will be selected for. (Sure, the less reproductively successful universes will also still chug away, reproducing less successfully – but there will be, by definition, a lot less of them.)

So the “something” that is increasing order is the extreme fine-tuning of those basic parameters (the strong nuclear force, the weak force, the mass of the electron, and so on). And that fine-tuning was done by Darwinian evolution, acting on ancestral universes, all the way along the evolutionary line that has led to this complex, reproductively successful universe of ours, with its forty quintillion black holes leading to forty quintillion Big Bangs; forty quintillion offspring. (What else could have so thoroughly fine-tuned our specific universe, other than Darwinian evolution? Give me another mechanism that we know of that can do such fine-tuning.)

And so there has already been a huge amount of selecting for function, before the Big Bang; the mass of the electron has been selected for function. The exact strength of the strong nuclear force has also been selected for function. (As has the point at which that force flips from attractive to repulsive.) That’s how and why the elements of the periodic table can be so swiftly and efficiently built in the heart of stars (by fusion), and distributed through supernova explosions (when the strong nuclear force flips from attraction to repulsion, as the star collapses, blowing those new elements back up out of the star’s gravity well). And so on, across all those parameters.

At this point in the long evolutionary history of universes, along our specific universe’s evolutionary line, it’s the function of those parameters to build out stars and galaxies and a full suite of elements and thus planets and biospheres, because those things ultimately lead to the reproductive success of universes, in all the ways I’ve described elsewhere, but I will now describe yet again, because it’s so important, and so interesting. (And because I’m constantly trying to explain it better; this website is where I’m working out the articulation of these ideas for the eventual book, so give me feedback at the end: is this clear? What can be improved?)

HOW THE EVOLUTION OF UNIVERSES HAS LEAD TO REPRODUCTIVE HYPER-SUCCESS: THE THREE KINDS OF BLACK HOLE

This (highly evolved) universe we live in is capable of producing (and does produce) three kinds of black hole. Each kind is the result of an evolutionary breakthrough, not in the lifetime of our specific universe, but in its distant evolutionary past. Each breakthrough built on the preceding breakthroughs, which were conserved; thus our specific universe, shortly after the Big Bang, first produces a modest number of primitive, easy-to-make, direct collapse supermassive black holes. (All universes that can reproduce have always been able to do that, going all the way back; it’s the simplest form of reproduction of universes, requiring no complex structures or even elements.)

Those supermassive black holes help build out galaxies of stars around themselves in ways I’ve described in detail elsewhere… which eventually generates a far larger number of more-complex-to-make, medium-sized, stellar-mass black holes, as the larger stars run out of fuel, collapse, and explode.

But once those stars have built the periodic table (by fusion) and distributed it (by exploding), many new stars (like our own) form from that enriched gas and dust, along with planets (and their moons) on which intelligent life develops, and then (to efficiently power itself) generates a huge number of much smaller, incredibly-complex-to-make, technologically-built black holes. (Because black holes convert mass into energy fifty times more efficiently than fusion.)

(A quick history lesson, to make sense of this: The original version of cosmological natural selection, by Lee Smolin, in the 1990s, just assumed our universe produced one kind of black hole – stellar-mass/stellar collapse black holes – with anything larger simply being made from a bunch of those merging; this made for an interesting, but speculative and rather static theory that didn’t explain life, or supermassive black holes. Over the next decade or two, Clément Vidal, John Smart, Michael E. Price, Edward R. Harrison, Louis Crane and others extended the theory to incorporate intelligence, and the intelligent technological manufacture of vast numbers of small black holes (for maximally efficient energy production), thus explaining why life might have evolved, and been conserved – it made for much more reproductively successful universes. And in the past few years, I have extended the theory again, by pointing out that the logic of evolution implies that the supermassive black holes found at the heart of galaxies are almost certainly an evolutionarily conserved, extremely primitive form of reproduction that goes right back to the earliest universes, and that such supermassive black holes should therefore form shortly after the Big Bang by direct collapse, not later by merger of smaller stellar mass black holes. That is, supermassive black holes should form first, and generate galaxies of stars around themselves. This is what the James Webb Space Telescope subsequently found.)

You will note that each stage – direct collapse supermassive black hole; stellar collapse (medium sized) black hole; technologically produced (small) black hole – requires more of the periodic table – more and heavier and more complex elements – to produce smaller (and thus more numerous, and thus more reproductively successful for the universe) black holes; that’s because each stage came later in the evolutionary history of universes; the periodic table, too, has evolved and complexified.

And it’s all that hidden-from-view selection of function, which preceded the Big Bang, which allows for all the selection for function inside this universe.

But what a liberating, glorious thought that is, that there is so much selection for function still going on inside this universe! Because that means evolution is most certainly not over. Universes have not been perfected.  And above all, that means this universe isn’t predetermined: matter is swiftly and efficiently built and distributed, but that matter nonetheless then has to explore the possibility space of this brand-new universe, ever-so-slightly different from its parent. Minerals will complexify wherever they can – on the surface of wet rocky planets like Earth, sure, but also deep in the liquid water oceans of icy moons with molten cores. Different worlds, under their very different conditions, will generate different minerals. It is not guaranteed you will get calcite, say, or amphibole, specifically. But you will get some complex, stable minerals, appropriate to their environment. And those geospheres will tend over time to become biospheres. (Because that has been selected for! That’s what carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen and sulphur and phosphorus and sodium and potassium, in this kind of highly evolved universe, do.)

At which point it is not guaranteed you will get human beings – that apes will become smart. Could be something more like an octopus, or a bear, or something really weird. Depends on the conditions of that particular planet, that particular icy moon. But something will become smart, and start to manipulate matter in ways which Nature alone, without life, cannot. Ways which will inevitably lead that smart something to the more and more efficient production of energy, to power whatever it chooses to do, and thus ultimately leads to the technological production of small black holes. (Which is why evolution, at the level of universes, selects so hard for intelligent, technology-wielding life, and evolution allows it to take over worlds so fast once it has emerged; it leads to massive reproductive success for that universe.) And right here, right now, that something happens to be us: We are the growing tip of a living universe, transforming it; bringing into being things never seen before. We are evolution in action. We are the agents, the 0.0000000000000000000001% of matter in this universe with agency, generating and processing ever more functional information, looking up at the planets, looking up at the stars, and thinking; what can I make this into? What do I want this universe to become?

HOLY SHIT, IT IS AMAZING TO BE US, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW…

There’s a real terror in the general scientific community about this kind of talk, by the way. A terror that you are about to summon God as an explanation for purpose, for direction, for order. And they are partly right to be terrified, because “God”, as usually summonsed by believers, isn’t a useful explanation, it’s an anti-scientific dead-end; great, you’ve “explained” the universe – “God made it!” – but all the weary work of explanation now has to begin all over again, to explain how the hell this new-level-of-reality God-thing (that we can’t actually see) came about, and got so complicated. Nothing has been explained.

But that is why cosmological natural selection, or the evolved universe hypothesis, is so beautiful, and powerful. It allows you to acknowledge, in full, the deep weird beauty of a universe that gets richer and more complex over time, that generates more and more structured order until it is nothing but gushers of life orbiting fountains of light circling vast spirals of fresh star production; and it explains all that, it gives you a full explanatory mechanism, without having to add anything new at all to our existing science, and without having to subtract anything. No made-up shit, no woo-woo. It just applies Darwin to universes, and clarifies everything.

IMAGINE NO RELIGION

But there is something here that is sympathetic to the impulse behind religion, even if it isn’t sympathetic to the concretised beliefs of any narrowly specific religion. Such a universe – a highly evolved universe selected for function, travelling along a developmental path where each level in turn selects for function – has many of the attributes human beings have traditionally associated with something human beings have usually called “God”.

After Darwin, evolution (based on inherited variations in genes) came to explain the complex, orderly structures of life, and how they came into being, step by step, generation by generation, from an earlier absolute chemical simplicity. Likewise, we are starting to see that evolution (based on inherited variations in the basic parameters of matter) best explains the complex, orderly structures of our universe, and how such a universe could come into being, step by step, generation by generation, from an earlier absolute simplicity in the fundamentals of matter itself. In both cases, evolution takes the place of God, without in any way detracting from the wonder and glory of the thing being explained.

And so here we are, in a gloriously ironic, and paradoxical, situation; with mainstream science denying clear evidence of evolution, in the mistaken belief that they are denying evidence of God.

OK, I’m done. Did I talk all over Bob? I did talk all over Bob. But hey, that’s the value I can add here. If you want to read him again, uninterrupted, there’s a clean transcript over on Big Think, from whence Bob let me borrow it.

And let me say again, it’s worth reading the original paper in full. There’s a lot of useful nuance in the paper that was perforce left out of this brief popular overview.

But basically, we are saying the same thing:

1. The way this universe channels its energy, so as to produce ever more complex, self-sustaining, self-complexifying structures, in the teeth of the second law of thermodynamics, requires an explanation. 

2. This universe clearly has purpose. Its parts have purpose. The complexification of those parts has a purpose. It is going somewhere and it is doing something and we are a vital part of that going, that doing.

3. There is an explanation for all this, and it is totally compatible with science.

Here is where we differ: Bob thinks the explanation is a law of increased functional information.

I think that an increase in functional information is indeed an aspect of our specific universe, but that it isn’t exactly a “law”, as such; it’s best understood as a downstream consequence of the fine-tuning of the basic parameters of matter by Darwinian evolution at the level of universes.

OK! We’re done. Share this with anyone you think might be interested. And throw in your thoughts in the comments.

I stayed in touch with Philip, and at one point he sent me a link to his article for Scientific American, in which he dismisses multiverse theories (arguing that they can’t explain the complexity and fine-tuning of our universe). 

I wrote an email in response, which I think makes a good mini-post, and so I have pasted it in below: the argument forced me to clarify my thoughts on this subject, and articulate them succinctly. (Also, I said I would give you glimpses behind the scenes of the writing process; well, it is from email conversations like this that much of the book emerges.)

Here’s Philip’s original article: Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse.

For those of you too lazy, sorry I mean busy, to read Philip’s article, I’ll just paste in the opening to the Wikipedia definition of the Gambler’s Fallacy.

“The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that, if an event (whose occurrences are independent and identically distributed) has occurred more frequently than expected, it is less likely to happen again in the future (or vice versa). The fallacy is commonly associated with gambling, where it may be believed, for example, that the next dice roll is more than usually likely to be six because there have recently been fewer than the expected number of sixes.”
–Wikipedia

And here is my email to Philip…

Hi Philip,

Thanks a million for getting back to me, and for sending me that link. Apologies for not replying before, as I was suddenly inundated with other writing deadlines, and I wanted to clear some time in which to read the article, and think about it before responding.

I love the article you sent me, because I agree with every word of it. And every word of it, in fact, supports my case.

All the multiverse options you discuss involve all the other universes having essentially random properties. And all such theories do indeed fall to the gambler's fallacy.

"How many times the gambler has rolled that night has no bearing on whether the next roll will be a double six."

But if we live in an evolved universe, where the offspring universes have only slightly different fundamental properties to those of their parents, and thus differential chances of reproductive success, the number of times the gambler has previously rolled the dice has an ENORMOUSLY consequential bearing on how likely it is that we live in a complex, fine-tuned universe. The difference between two sequential rolls still won't be of any detectable significance (just as the evolutionary difference between two sequential generations of bacteria aren't of any detectable significance); but the difference after a long enough sequence of rolls where evolution is a factor at each step will be HUGE, as we see with DNA evolution.

By analogy, if you were an observer with a very limited field of view and the only thing, the only blob of matter, which you knew to exist, which you could perceive, was a giraffe – one giraffe, that's all you knew of that exists – then explaining why this blob of matter was so complex would be extremely difficult, without a theory of evolution. You could postulate that there were many other blobs of matter, inaccessible to you, and that most of them were probably much blobbier, and didn't contain kidneys and eyeballs and lungs and a heart and a long neck and so on. And that you had just been incredibly unfeasibly lucky in your particular blob of matter, in its marvellous accidental random complexity. But that's not a satisfying theory, and it is completely missing the reason for the complexity. Indeed, it's denying there is a reason. It's just a highly unlikely chance arrangement of matter.

Similarly, a theory like Wheeler's initial multiverse theory where universes give birth to randomly different universes doesn't really get you anywhere, because, yes, the gambler's fallacy kicks in. Sure, you might get a blob of ridiculously unlikely complexity at some point, but there is no reason to, ever.

No matter how long the random generation of random universes goes on, a giraffe never gets more likely. First universe in the sequence, last universe in the sequence, all equally unlikely to be complex.

But the brilliance of Smolin's tweak (and I cannot understand how nobody seems to really get this – you are not alone in writing entire articles about multiverses without mentioning it, there was similar article in Aeon last month) is that the longer the evolutionary generation of universes goes on, the more likely a particular universe will be large, stable and complex. Evolution EXPLAINS the size, the stability, and the complexity we see in our specific universe, in precisely the way a random multiverse theory cannot. (And, given that our universe contains an estimated 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 stellar mass black holes, it is clearly descended from a long line of highly reproductively successful universes!)

Of course, Smolin then fails to see the broader implications of his own theory, as they roll through field after field, but that's another conversation for another day.

Feel free to give feedback /disagree / poke holes in my argument. In fact, I would love to have a quick chat with you about this sometime, because I think it's supremely important, not just for my work but for yours.

Fond regards,

-Julian

AFTERWORD:

I should probably also mention here that Philip had a fall recently in which he fractured his skull and had two brain bleeds. Let me take this chance to wish him a full recovery (which, fingers crossed, looks very likely); I greatly look forward to arguing with him full strength again, when it is once more safe for him to shake his head in violent disagreement with me.

What did I do? Spent time with my family; my wife, my son, my daughter; my mother, my brother. At my father’s funeral in Ireland, I met my cousins, my aunts, my father’s many, many friends.

It was a deeply consoling funeral; my father had left a detailed plan (down to precisely when and where each friend should sing each song), and we were able to carry out his every instruction. My brother Desmond did all the hard work to make that happen, coming down from Cavan for a full month to help our mother get through the whole thing and out the other side; I am intensely grateful to him. At the funeral, Desmond read out the last line of the funeral instructions, written in our father’s characteristically exuberant handwriting, and addressed to everyone in the packed church: “And enjoy it!”

We did, we did. There was as much laughing as crying.

And I made some effort, over the past couple of months, to meet up with, to fix my frayed connections with, my own old friends. Several of us have lost parents over the past couple of years (mostly fathers, because fathers tend to go first). There was a lot to talk about. It was good.

I also did some things I needed to do. I put more effort into being a husband, and a father (and a brother, and a son). I applied for funding for The Egg and the Rock, to ensure I can keep doing this for the next year while still keeping my family in the luxury to which they have grown accustomed (ie, food, regularly). I worked on the introduction to the book, and the opening chapters, and the overall book proposal. I read a lot of scientific papers, and chapters, and even a few actual all-the-way-through-to-the-end books. I talked to some excellent scientists. Oh, and I had a children’s book come out, two weeks after dad died, which I did not promote as hard as I should have because I was sad.

Anyway, I am in good form now, and ready to post in public again. If you knew my dad, or would simply like to know more about him, there’s a full eulogy here. (I got them to remove the paywall, behind which it was originally trapped.) I'd like you to know his story, because I think it is a hopeful one, a useful one, an uplifting one; and because I love him, and am proud of him, and want more of the people with whom he shared the earth to know that he lived. Besides which, he was an extraordinary man; he led a remarkable life, which reflected (and was distorted by) many of the important events and trends of the first century of Irish independence. We need to understand our complicated and often painful past, if we are not to repeat its mistakes. So, if you have a few minutes, here it is.

Thanks for your patience while I was gone, and your kind words, both here in the comments and elsewhere, through other channels.

We’ll talk soon. Look after each other.

My father, Richard (Dick) Gough has died suddenly, and unexpectedly, at home (in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary). He ate lunch with the love of his life, my mother Betty, and died before he could have his dessert. (Custard.) He was healthy as a horse, despite his advanced years, so this is a tremendous shock to all of us. Only upside: he went exactly the way he always said he wanted to: “Out like a light. I don’t want to hang around.”

He was a terrific guy, and a great father. I loved him, and I'm going to miss him.

His funeral details:

Reposing on Thursday, February 29th, at Keller's Funeral Home, Nenagh (E45 XO94), from 5pm until 7pm. Funeral arriving on Friday to St. Mary of the Rosary Church, Nenagh (E45 YH29), for Funeral Mass at 11 am, followed by burial in St. Patrick's Rock Burial Ground, Cashel, arriving at 2.15 approx. Dick's Funeral Mass can be viewed on

http://nenaghparish.ie

For people that don’t know my dad or Nenagh, or Cashel, but are curious: Yes, that’s the same church Shane McGowan’s funeral was recently held in. It’s our local (as it was Shane’s). Yes, dad is being buried on the Rock of Cashel, where his mother, grandmother, great-grandfather et al are buried. If you are coming, dress warm and wear sturdy, waterproof shoes, it’s going to be wet and windy up there.

He was a hell of a guy.

Ní bheidh a leithéid ann arís.

Further information, condolences, etc, here:

https://rip.ie/death-notice/richard-dick-gough-tipperary-nenagh-547893

Now, go talk to someone you love. Remember that it can all blow away in a moment – it will all blow away in a moment, for every relationship you have, and you have no idea when that moment will be – and you will never get a chance to speak to them again. N. E. V. E. R. Don’t leave the stuff that matters unsaid; or unheard.

Peace and love.

IT’S NOT JUST A FLAW IN THE THEORY

Let’s return to the problem that these breakthroughs always point in the same direction: the universe is larger than we expected; the universe is more complicated than we expected; the universe is more structured than we expected; the universe is more energy-efficient than we expected; that energy is more meaningfully directed than we expected.

The fact that these repeated errors all point in the same direction is a sign that there is a major flaw in our entire approach. And that the flaw is likely to be an unexamined assumption underlying the whole theory, rather than an explicit and visible part of the theory itself.

If there were merely a flaw in the theory – a mathematical error of some kind, say – then those repeated identical errors should, by now, have given us the necessary information, the necessary feedback, to find the flaw in the theory, and fix it. Our errors should no longer all lean the same way.  But with a flawed underlying assumption that isn’t explicitly articulated inside the theory, you can go wrong in the same way again and again and again, without getting useful feedback.

PHYSICS IS PHYSICS; BUT…

Of course, there is a sense in which it shouldn’t matter whether you are studying an egg or a rock; physics is physics, and the same rules apply. But there is another sense in which it matters a lot; the way physics plays out in an egg is different to the way physics plays out in a rock of roughly the same size and chemical composition. Same physics; very different outcomes. In the egg, the energy that moves through the system does so along routes shaped by evolution, and so organises the system; in the rock, the energy that moves through the system does so randomly (as there are no evolved channels) and so disorganises the system. Eggs develop; rocks decay.

And so my argument is that until the mainstream scientific community change from a universe-as-rock paradigm to a universe-as-egg paradigm – to an evolved universe paradigm – they will continue to be blindsided by the unanticipated complexity of our universe’s structure; by the startling underlying efficiency of its messy processes; by the unexpected discovery of new, dynamic, out-of-equilibrium systems at all levels; by the surprising intricacy of its interlocking parts… In other words, by the many unanticipated ways in which the basic parameters of matter have been fine-tuned by evolution to interact, under specific developmental conditions, so as to generate structure, complexity, order, and efficiency, so as to ensure reproductive success (for our universe), through the mechanisms we discussed in the previous chapter.

EGGS DEVELOP, ROCKS DECAY

And, above all, until they start using egg physics rather than rock physics, they will be blindsided particularly badly in the early universe; particularly in the first billion years – the last refuge of randomness – where they thought they would, finally, find random matter blindly obeying arbitrary laws – and where instead, again and again (as I predicted), they are finding the structure, and order, of a fine-tuned, highly-evolved organism efficiently and rapidly proceeding along a clear developmental path.

GOT MYSELF A CRYING, TALKING, SLEEPING, WALKING, LIVING UNIVERSE

The phrase “a living universe” has been ruined by a million well-meaning, but scientifically illiterate, New Age books that can’t tell a galaxy from an asteroid; and yet, what else can you call a universe that, as it unfolds, spontaneously generates things like us, and the living world around us? A universe of which we are just a tiny sub-unit?

We have only just discovered, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, that spiral galaxies (made mostly of simple hydrogen and helium) rapidly self-assemble, star by star, around startlingly large supermassive black holes – far more rapidly than the mainstream anticipated.

And how do you even get supermassive black holes that massive, that early, that fast, without evolutionary fine-tuning of the starting conditions for our universe, so that the vast cloud of gas required is so lacking in turbulence and disorder that it can smoothly collapse in one go, without fragmenting on the way to form countless stars instead (as large gas clouds would do later in the development of our universe)?

So what we seem to be seeing is (as I predicted) a smooth early universe optimised for supermassive black hole formation; with those supermassive black holes, once generated, then shocking and enriching the entire surrounding environment, optimising it for star formation.

We know, too, that the stars in those galaxies go on to manufacture, in a multistep process, through stellar fusion – and widely distribute, through astonishingly powerful supernova explosions – the entire periodic table and its suite of heavier elements.

Which then self-assemble into not just planets, but rich, complex, self-regulating biospheres like our own Earth’s.

Which generate complex intelligent biological lifeforms, like us.

Which generate complex meta-intelligent networked technologies, like books, communication satellites, the internet, and (eventually, building on those foundations), artificial intelligence.

Which leads to another step-change in the rate of change, as that artificial intelligence forms a positive feedback loop with the people and technology that formed it – massively accelerating the potential rate change for the entire interdependent, and intimately entwined, biological, cultural, and technological system.

We live, then, in a living universe, endlessly generating orderly complex structures, at higher and higher levels of complexity, in sequenced, integrated, steps. A universe where all the various parts work surprisingly well together – and do so with all the exuberant, wasteful, brilliant, messy, improvisational logic of an evolved system at such a scale.

It’s a system which, over the lifetimes of countless ancestor universes, has – to borrow the language of evolutionary biology – random-walked its way through an immense possibility space to a local fitness peak.

And it is, crucially, a universe of Darwinian evolutionary processes nested inside other Darwinian evolutionary processes – with each moving more rapidly than the last, because each can run on rails laid down by those earlier evolutionary processes.

What is particularly fascinating (from a human point of view) is that human beings are currently at the growing tip of that living universe – our technological society is the hyperactive transformative point at the very top of that immense stack of evolutionary processes, driving the development to maturity of our specific universe.

No wonder it feels weird to be alive in this moment: we are the universe undergoing puberty.

In the past few decades, human beings have created – in labs here on Earth – temperatures colder than can exist naturally anywhere in this radiation-saturated universe; colder than the freezing voids of deep space. Meanwhile, by colliding particles at close to lightspeed, we have created temperatures of trillions of degrees; 250,000 times hotter than is found in the heart of our Sun. In our factories and laboratories, we have called into being hundreds of thousands of chemicals, compounds, and forms of matter which have never existed in the universe before.

Of course, other intelligent life forms on other planets around other stars may well have called them into being too: in an evolved universe, fine-tuned to generate life (because that ultimately leads to more efficient small black hole production, and thus more reproductive success for the universe itself), we are most definitely not going to turn out to be alone.

We are important, but we are not unique.

NESTED EVOLUTIONS

No, nature cannot produce these strange new materials unaided, just as she cannot turn sand into thinking computer chips, or advanced AI. But nature – our evolved, fine-tuned universe – can produce us (and others like us, on other worlds), and we can then perform these miracles of thinking sand. Thus the extremely rapid (because consciously directed and intentional) evolution of our technology (with human beings as the replicators), from the abacus through the primitive punchcard-mainframe computer to advanced cloud-based AI…

…All of this nested inside the slower (because less consciously directed) evolution of our societies (with, again, human beings as the replicators); from hunter-gatherer cultures, through the agricultural and industrial revolutions, to the exponentially faster change of technology-based societies, moving at the speed of software updates…

…All nested inside the faaaaar slower (because undirected) multi-billion year evolution of DNA organisms; from one-celled prokaryotic bacteria to giraffes, and giant redwoods, and Homo sapiens…

…All nested inside the unimaginably slow evolution – through generation after generation of ancestral universes – of matter itself, chemistry itself. An evolution invisible to us, because it occurred outside the lifetime of our specific, individual universe – the evolution that fine-tuned oxygen, carbon, phosphorus: evolution at the level of the proton and the electron; of the strong and weak nuclear force.

That unimaginably slow evolution at the level of universes shaped matter itself so that matter could shape the chemistry that allows for stuff like DNA, so that stuff like DNA could shape things like us, so that things like us – so that we, in this specific case, in this specific universe –could shape our silicon computers, AIs, and whatever it is we are going to do next…

There were earlier versions of all these things, at all these levels, in earlier generations of universe, that were less good at doing what they do: but by now, all of them, at all those levels, have been refined by the simple, subtle, patient, tool of evolution.

Our universe is coming to life through us. The very rocks are starting to think our thoughts. Because our specific universe evolved to do just this: it’s not a bizarre, inexplicable, unlikely, one-off accident – it’s a developmental process playing out, like gestation, or puberty, in a specific evolved human being.

And so it is evolution all the way up… and all the way down.

If we, and our technologies, and our thinking sand, are up there at the tip of the growing universe, and the top of the stack of nested evolutions, then let’s go back down, to see how this works; how the same force – evolution – shapes everything, at all levels, all scales, over all time horizons, inside our universe and out.

Yes, let’s go all the way down.

DOWN TO THE FLICKERING SEA OF QUARKS

Without the fine-tuned, highly evolved, complex structured perfection of, for example, the proton, there can be no stars, no galaxies, no technology-wielding organisms: no self-aware, matter-manipulating complex, structured universe.

Fine-tuned? Highly evolved? Complex? Structured? Yes. But you have to zoom in to see it…

As our tools have grown more sensitive over the past century-and-a-bit, our understanding of the proton has gone in exactly the same direction as everything else. Slowly, step by astonished observational step, the proton has transformed in our understanding from a simple lump of positive charge to a thing of almost infinite complexity – a process rather than an object – with three quarks held together by the strong force, mediated by gluons, floating in a sea of virtual quark-antiquark pairs and further, transitory, gluons, which constantly flicker in and out of existence to help maintain the proton’s remarkably unlikely, highly dynamic, out-of equilibrium stability.

Which is to say, our misunderstanding of the proton leaned in exactly the same direction as all our other misunderstandings. Our misunderstanding of stars. Our misunderstanding of galaxies. Our misunderstanding of the universe itself. Not a simple, dead object; instead a rich, lively, orderly process. Not random and unlikely; instead, evolved and necessary. Not arbitrary; instead, simply one layer of evolved, structured complexity, fine-tuned by evolution to play its part in a universe-sized system of such interlocking layers.

In cosmology, all our mistakes lean in the same direction.

If you just had a single universe, a random one-off, where matter had arbitrary qualities – well then, happening by chance to get a structured, complex, longterm-stable proton such as we find in our universe, and the structured, complex, longterm-stable universe (containing quintillions of black holes) which it allows to develop, would be far, far more than a quintillion-to-one-shot.

The wonderful recent paper (which I have mentioned before, yes, and will mention again; it’s terrific) by Michael L. Wong, Carol E. Cleland, Daniel Arend Jr., Stuart Bartlett, H. James Cleaves II, Heather Demarest, Anirudh Prabhu, Jonathan I. Lunine, and Robert M. Hazen – On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems – makes exactly this point, without quite making the leap to an evolutionary explanation. (But I am talking to a couple of them about maybe making that leap!)

One strategy for identifying important aspects of our complexifying universe is to imagine a “possible world” with the same initial low-entropy state that marches through time in full accordance with the second law, but does not produce any systems of increasing complexity. What would be different about that world that prohibits order, diversity, and function to arise?

In this patternless world of our imagination, systems smoothly march toward states of higher entropy without generating any long-lived pockets of low entropy, for example, because of an absence of attractive forces (gravity, electrostatics) or universal overriding repulsive forces. That is, no barriers exist that prevent systems from taking a direct path to thermodynamic equilibrium as they evolve. It may not even be possible to draw boundaries between different macroscopic “entities” in such a universe: Can anything be distinguished if the entire universe is just a soup of matter and energy, quickly dissipating random fluctuations, and cooling off indefinitely?

Our universe is not that imaginary universe: It produces entities that do not take the most direct paths to their highest entropy states. Something “frustrates” and sometimes directs the dissipation of free energy, permitting the long-lived existence of disequilibria.

–From On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems

Aaaaaargh, they are so close!

But if you have a long evolutionary series of universes, where the fundamental qualities of the matter vary slightly with each generation (loosely analogous to the variations in DNA in each generation of a biological organism), and where reproduction is through black holes/big bangs, and where those universes producing more black holes, big bangs, and thus baby universes, get, by definition, more chances to explore the nearby possibility space for those qualities of matter that they happen to have… well, yes, you could eventually get that unlikely, fine-tuned proton, in a universe producing unlikely numbers – quintillions – of black holes… and a heck of a lot of those pesky, hard-to-explain, “long-lived pockets of low entropy”. Reproductive success is rewarded, it leads to ever-finer fine tuning – and our black-hole-packed universe is clearly at the end of a very successful evolutionary line.

The naive anthropic principle would helplessly have you believe that structured, complex universes containing life (and extraordinary numbers of black holes), such as our own universe, are remarkably unlikely – their argument being that, given an infinite number of random universes, you’ll eventually get one or two like ours which – by pure chance, and against all odds – happen to generate life (and extraordinary numbers of black holes – which also don’t mean anything). Of course, they say, we’re not in any of the others – the infinite number of lifeless others – because they don’t contain life, and so have no one to observe them. We’re here because we’re here. We see this universe because we could see no other. We are freaks in a quintillion-to-one-shot, random, universe.

MAKING CHANCE GO AWAY

But if, instead, universes are the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process, then structured, complex, reproductively successful universes such as our own are not remarkably unlikely; they are instead highly likely – they are the majority; they are the rule. Down this evolutionary line, the vast majority of universes should by now produce (as ours seems to) hundreds of millions of supermassive black holes, then quintillions of smaller, stellar-mass black holes, and then (through matter-manipulating, energy producing-and-consuming lifeforms like us) incalculable numbers of (technologically-produced) ultra-small, energy-producing black holes. These are the three great (evolved) breakthroughs in reproductive success, down our universe’s evolutionary line.

In other words, in our specific universe: yes, the laws of nature and the properties of matter are fixed, just as a specific individual’s DNA is fixed. The basic properties of matter in our universe, and the DNA in our bodies, are both highly unlikely, and non-random: yet both got to that point of highly unlikely-looking, non-random, structured complexity through a lengthy, blind, random-walk evolutionary process that long precedes the birth of the individual. And in both cases, reproductive success provided the feedback that, generation by generation, moved the system away from randomness and towards its current structured complexity.

What we see, therefore, in the ongoing development of our universe since it was born in the Big Bang, is not random and arbitrary. But nor is what we are seeing here teleology – that is, purpose-driven behaviour due to the actions, or design, of some external God. It is, instead, what biologists would call teleonomy: purpose-driven behavior due to a code or mechanism. And that mechanism is evolution; that code is the basic parameters of matter, fine-tuned, over countless previous generations of ancestral universe, by that evolutionary mechanism.

This book will explore that process (indeed, that series of nested evolutionary processes) for our universe. The process of Darwinian evolution that led, step by step, from the earliest and most primitive, crudely duplicating, single-cell-of-a-universe, to this wild peacock, this giraffe, this blue whale of a universe, filled with thinking, feeling, living matter like me and you, transforming everything we touch; magic-making monkeys hurling ourselves exuberantly into space; sending our metal proxies to study other planets; teaching the very sand to think and argue and play chess and conjure visions and draw and design and build wild new machines (while both creating and solving astonishing new problems) – and all of it better and faster than we ever could alone.

We are the evolved universe coming alive, coming into being, coming into its power, and this book is the story of that universe, and how it came to be.

The first in a series of three posts exploring how, and why, cosmological natural selection (evolution at the level of universes) could eventually lead to there being so many icy moons with liquid water oceans in our own specific universe. More interesting than it sounds…

INTRO: HOW TO ACHIEVE SCIENTIFIC IMMORTALITY BY BOILING YOUR OWN PISS

In 1669, under conditions of great secrecy, a German alchemist called Hennig Brand (also known as Dr. Teutonicus – what a great supervillain name!), collected 5000 liters of piss (his own, and that of his neighbours) left it to age until it stank, then boiled it for several days, before processing the resulting bright yellow paste, hoping to create gold.

Instead, he became the first person on earth to isolate pure phosphorus – an element so reactive, it did not exist (and never had existed) as a free element anywhere else on the planet. In doing so, he became the first named individual to discover a new element at a specific time in history. (No one now knows who discovered gold, for instance, or silver, or mercury.)

End of intro…

OK, this post did not strictly need that historical intro, but your life would be the poorer if you didn’t know phosphorus’s glamorous origin story. Plus, it’s a nice reminder that, although the self-image of science involves making breakthroughs by the cool and objective application of reductionist materialist logic to carefully formulated problems, the actual history of scientific breakthroughs involves alchemists boiling vast quantities of their own piss in the search for the elixir of life. So, the next time a scientist of your acquaintance objects to the clichéd Hollywood depiction of the mad scientist in his laboratory (a German accent! Lots of steam rising from glass containers! A deeply peculiar smell!), simply point, with a sorrowful sigh, to Hennig Brand.

BACK TO ENCELADUS

Back to Enceladus. I can understand if you are underwhelmed by the recent news that there’s lots of phosphorus on Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, sloshing around in its hidden liquid-water ocean, deep beneath its bright, icy surface. You pee up to half a gram of phosphorus every morning – the ocean under your icy surface is awash with phosphorus, so what’s the big deal about finding the chemical element known as P on some random moon?

Well, the discovery of phosphorus on Enceladus is a big deal because it is so infernally reactive (as I just mentioned – see, that historical intro was useful). Its reactivity meant that, until recently, it was assumed all the phosphorus on Enceladus was locked up in rocks – not dissolved in the water, and thus available to life. So, finding lots of phosphorus in that hidden ocean is HUGE news. It means a universe jammed with life now looks far more likely. And it’s strong evidence for an evolved universe – for a universe fine-tuned by evolution at the level of universes to generate the conditions for life. But you need a bit of background to understand why.

So let me answer some obvious questions…

1.) What exactly is so interesting about Enceladus?

2.) Why is finding phosphorus there such a big deal?

3.) Indeed, how the heck did we find out Enceladus has so much of it, seeing as nothing has ever landed on its surface, and its ocean is hidden beneath miles of ice?

4.) And how does this change the odds for finding life throughout the universe?

Let’s start at the beginning.

ENCELADUS IS A MOON OF SATURN… WHAT, START FURTHER BACK? OK…

I’m going to take a moment to locate ourselves, relative to Enceladus. That is partly because distance from the Sun is an important part of this story (and of the story of icy moons generally, which we’ll be exploring over these three posts). But it is also because I have slowly come to realise that most people’s mental map of the universe is built from three half-remembered science documentaries, two conversations with a knowledgable friend held while lying on your backs looking up at the Milky Way at 3am incredibly stoned, and Star Wars; it can, therefore, lack a certain accuracy. 

Take for example, the UK’s current Minister for Space:

The Conservative space minister has apparently confused Mars with the Sun.

Andrew Griffith, who has been in charge of the space sector since November, also mistook Jupiter for Saturn.

On a walk around the Science Museum in London, Mr Griffith pointed to an exhibit showing the surfaces of different planets, the House magazine reported. “Now we have got Mars,” he said, before being told by a member of museum staff that it was actually the Sun.

He went on to say “that one is Saturn”, after the display changed, before the employee said “no, no, that is Jupiter”, according to the magazine.

Insisting he is learning on the job as space minister, he said: “I’m not an encyclopaedia.”

–From The Independent, January 15th 2024, “Tory space minister mixes up Mars and the Sun”

If that’s the current state of knowledge of the Minister for Space, then I may need to revise my internal mental model of What Everybody Probably Already Knows.

I am, therefore, going to go back to basics here.

BASICS

So, that big, bright, yellow thing in the sky is a star that we call the Sun, right? (Don’t touch it, it’s hot.) Really fucking massive. (Weighs more than 300,000 Earths). Because it’s so massive, with a huge gravitational pull, any small things nearby orbit it. (OK, more accurately, the Sun doesn’t “pull” anything; it bends the surrounding spacetime, so the planets fall in a curve around it – but let’s not go there today.)

Thus the Earth is one of eight known planets orbiting the Sun, in this order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars (all pretty small and rocky), then Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune (much larger and gassier and waaaay further out, with immense amounts of hydrogen and helium surrounding their small rocky cores).

This planetary layout, by the way, may be due to the sun boiling off the hydrogen and helium layers from the inner planets shortly after they formed, while those light, gassy layers remained intact on planets further out, where it is much, much colder. (Lately our telescopes have grown good enough to spot some of the planets orbiting nearby stars – yeah, exoplanets – and so we now know that young stars with young planets can have big, hot, Jupiter-like gassy planets orbiting really close to their star – but that might be just because there hasn’t been time for their hydrogen and helium to boil off yet. If we came back in a few billion years we might just see their rocky core – a former hot Jupiter would look much like Earth, or Venus.)  Anyway, all the gas giants in our solar system orbit the Sun way the hell out – beyond the Frost Line, the point where volatile substances (like water, methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide) are far enough away from the sun that they can get cold enough to form longterm, stable solids. Including icy moons…

A TIMID READER WRITES: Er… did you forget Pluto?

No. Pluto – small, and more icy than rocky – used to be considered the ninth planet, but it got demoted in 2006, because it turns out it’s really small (only two-thirds the diameter of Earth's Moon) and light (just 1/6^th the mass of our Moon), and also has a pretty eccentric orbit around the sun; sometimes it swings even closer to the sun than Neptune, sometimes it’s much further out. Which means it doesn’t make the cut for planets.

AN ASIDE ON PLANETS, GODDESSES, NAMES, AND CHAOS

That cut is kind of artificial, by the way: “planet” wasn’t officially defined until 2006. That was the year the International Astronomical Union realised, after the discovery of Eris (which is more massive than Pluto!) and several other almost-as-big rocks/planets/whatever-the-hecks, orbiting the Sun far beyond even Neptune, that they were going to end up with, potentially, dozens of really weird little planets (chaos!) if they didn’t come up with a tight definition. So they did it, basically, to stop Eris from becoming the tenth planet.

This was a harsh blow to followers of Discordianism – the belief system based around the original Eris. (Who was, of course – as I’m sure you know, Minister – the Greek goddess of chaos, strife, and discord.) Wikipedia despairingly attempts to define, describe, or somehow verbally corral Discordianism thus: “… variously defined as a religion, philosophy, paradigm, or parody religion.” All of these are true, and I know, because I am myself a Discordian. It is possible you are too, though you may not know it yet. There are, possibly, many others, but…

“It is difficult to estimate the number of Discordians because they are not required to hold Discordianism as their only belief system, and because there is an encouragement to form schisms and cabals.”
–Wikipedia, Discordianism

It also doesn’t help that all Discordians are automatically, on joining, made Popes. Just as a Catholic Pope can issue a dogma – which is infallible, and must be believed absolutely – Discordian Popes can issue catmas, which are extremely relative meta-beliefs. And, according to the Discordian Wiki, the central Discordian catma is:

“All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”
–Sri Syadasti

Discordians thus have considerable latitude in defining, and redefining, their religion, and indeed, reality. (I have also found this catma extremely useful in navigating scientific language during my research.)

You may think this aside is entirely unconnected to the sober business of NASA and ESA missions to the moons of Saturn, but you would be wrong. Discordianism has infiltrated NASA itself, as Wikipedia slyly hints:

The "five-fingered hand of Eris" (…) is one of several symbols used in Discordianism. It was adapted as an astronomical/astrological symbol for the dwarf planet Eris. Initially, the planetary symbol, designed by Discordian Denis Moskowitz, was rotated 90 degrees and had a cross-bar added so that it resembled two lunate epsilons (Є) back-to-back…

…with epsilon being the Greek initial of 'Eris'. The cross-bar was later dropped, but the vertical orientation retained. (The Discordian symbol has no set orientation, but is most commonly horizontal.) The symbol has seen use in public-outreach publications by NASA, though planetary symbols play only a minor role in modern astronomy.
–Wikipedia, Discordianism

But the connection goes deeper than even I realised when I began writing this post…

“On September 16, 2006, famed Discordian Louise Lacey, aka Lady L., F.A.B., sent the following letter to Michael E. Brown, the Caltech astronomer who named the dwarf planet “Eris,” thus ushering in the Aeon of Discord.”
–Historia Discordia

Sigh. That pesky Aeon of Discord. It could all have been so different, if the International Astronomical Union had just allowed Eris to be the tenth planet…

Anyway, subsequently, Professor Michael E. Brown of Caltech called his book about this turbulent era in planet-finding-and-abolishing-and-naming-and-renaming How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. A sly reference, perhaps, to the subheading of the Principia Discordia: How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her.

An aside to the aside: If you guessed, from the subtitle, that the Principia Discordia was written in the 1960s, you would be correct. If you also guessed that the two young authors included, coincidentally, a close friend of the young Lee Harvey Oswald, and that the first Discordian writings were printed out at the very start of the 1960s using the mimeograph machine of, coincidentally, Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney who was later to investigate the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy by, coincidentally, Lee Harvey Oswald, you would also be correct. Chaos, once unleashed, is hard to contain... If you were to furthermore guess that this stack of coincidences led to extreme paranoia in at least one of the authors of the Principia Discordia, not helped by his later prosecution by Garrison, and that researching this whole area is a great way to waste an incredible amount of time while slowly but surely losing your fucking marbles, you would also be correct. But, if you are intrigued by this particularly weird chunk of spacetime, and are happy to risk losing some marbles, then let me point you to The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, by that upstanding historian of conspiracy theories, Adam Gorightly (with a forward by Robert Anton Wilson). Oh, and also Gorightly’s Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society.

End of aside to the aside. Back to the original aside.

A TIMID READER WRITES: Wait! Excuse me… Does any of this have anything to do with astronomy, and icy moons?

ME: Yes, a lot, ultimately.

A TIMID READER WRITES: Um… could you tell us what the connection is?

ME: No. Not yet. Trust me.

A TIMID READER WRITES: But there is definitely a reason for all this, yes?

ME: Well… Perhaps, at this point, a quote from acclaimed American record producer and barefoot bearded Zen sage Rick Rubin might help settle your nerves.

“The artwork is the point where all the elements come together – the universe, the prism of self, the magic and discipline of transmuting idea to flesh. And if these lead you into contradiction – into territories that seem unbridgeable or unknowable – that doesn’t mean they aren’t harmonious.

Even in perceived chaos there is order and pattern. A cosmic undercurrent running through all things, which no story is immense enough to contain.

The universe never explains why.”

–Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

A TIMID READER WRITES: Oh... When do we get back to the icy moons?

ME: Soon. Hang in there…

Professor Brown might not have had deep connections to Discordianism when he first named Eris, but he does now: He was admitted to the prestigious Order of the Pineapple on 18 January 2020. Only two people per year can be so honoured: the other person admitted to the Order that day was Robert Shea – co-author, along with Robert Anton Wilson, of the Illuminatus! trilogy, a satire of the 1960s in which all the conspiracy theories of the era are simultaneously true, and whose presiding goddess is of course Eris.

Previous winners include Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Alan Moore, Zeus, Steve Jackson, and Monty Python. (Has Discordianism – like astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics – historically been dominated by A Certain Kind of Person? Sure. but feel free to adjust that in the glorious future. Eris Needs You.)

End of aside…

So anyway, Saturn is a big gas giant planet – the one with the spectacular rings – orbiting way the fuck out, beyond Mercury and Venus, beyond Earth, beyond Mars, beyond the Asteroid Belt (a big ring of rocks and dust, and roughly where the Frost Line begins), beyond Jupiter…. almost one and a half billion kilometres from the sun (so, nearly ten times further from the sun than we are here on Earth). And because Saturn is the most massive thing out there (it weighs more than 95 Earths), any small things nearby orbit it. And so Saturn has, at the last count, 146 moons. (I’m sure it will be more by the time I hit “Publish”; with telescopes and probes and analytical software all improving all the time, they keep finding new ones.)

FINALLY, ENCELADUS…

Enceladus is the sixth largest of these. (Named, by the way, after the Greek mythical giant Enceladus, whose mum was Gaia and whose dad was… well, Enceladus was born from the blood which gushed out after Uranus was castrated with a stone sickle by another son of Gaia-and-Uranus, Cronus, who then chucked his dad’s testicles into the sea, thus instituting a golden age in which "everyone did the right thing, and immorality was absent”. Yes, Greek myths would have hugely benefited from a stern-but-fair script editor who made the writers go back and do another draft.)

Enceladus is only five hundred kilometres in diameter; Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, by comparison, is over five thousand kilometres in diameter – even bigger than the planet Mercury, or Earth’s moon (which is just 3,474 km across). Or, for people who don’t like trying to visualise numbers; if Titan is a grapefruit, our Moon is a nice juicy apple… and Enceladus is a rather small grape. (Which would make Saturn, uh… there isn’t any fruit big enough… OK, Saturn is the transparent plastic ball that Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips climbs into and uses to crowdsurf… These are all extremely rough relative approximations to aid visualisation, don’t get mad if they are out by 30%.)

Oh, and Enceladus is located right in the centre of the E-Ring, a rather dim but very broad ring of Saturn. Enceladus drives around that ring slap bang in the middle of the road, like a car full of stoned teenagers – probably recently-converted Flaming Lips fans, who stumbled on “Do You Realise??” last week, via TikTok – concentrating intently on circling a roundabout, without hitting the edges, at 3am.

Yeah, right in the middle. INTERESTING COINCIDENCE, HUH? More on that later…

ICE SEA THE MOON (AND THE MOON SEAS ME)

Because Saturn is nearly ten times further away from the sun than Earth is, being one of Saturn’s moons is a really fecking cold job. Sunlight drops off as the square of the distance (so – and I am addressing Andrew Griffith, the Minister for Space, here – move twice as far away, you get four times less light; three times further away, you get nine times less light; four times further away, you get sixteen times less light, and so on). So Saturn and her moons get almost 100 times less sunlight per square meter than we do on earth. (In figures: the top of the Earth’s atmosphere gets a maximum of 1,413 watts per square meter from the sun; Enceladus gets less than 17.) Cold!

That means the surface of Enceladus is ice: nice, old-fashioned, frozen water; H2O in a crystal lattice. And, before we sent probes there to check, scientists assumed it would be like that all the way down: A solid ball of ice, maybe with some rock at its core.

SLOWLY LEARNING ABOUT ENCELADUS, PROBE BY PROBE

Let us start this uplifting and educational section with an inspirational quotation about perseverance:

“When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.”
–Monty Python and the Holy Grail; not to be mistaken for the The Holy Grail of Eris (the web serial novel written by Kujira Tokiwa, or its manga version by Hinase Momoyama)

OK. Inspired? Ready to persevere? Good. I’ll do this probe by probe, because that will give you a clearer idea of how solar system science progresses both relatively rapidly (the instrument technology and image resolution are far better on each probe), and relatively slowly (there can be a pause of decades between probes).

PIONEER 11

The first probe to visit sexy Saturn (and its encircling rings and many moons), was dear old Pioneer 11, launched in 1973, when high quality digital photography was still a distant dream. It sent back some grainy photos of Saturn, but it didn’t get any shots of Enceladus.

VOYAGER 1

The second probe was Voyager 1: launched three years after Pioneer 11, in 1977, it finally got close enough to take a photo of Enceladus on November 12, 1980 – but it was from 624,000 kilometers away, and showed no surface features.

VOYAGER 2

But the third probe to make it to Saturn, Voyager 2  (also launched in 1977) got close enough to Enceladus (87,000 kilometres) to notice something weird: although some of its surface was covered in overlapping craters, of all ages, from billions of years of impacts (just as Earth’s Moon is), much of the surface was smooth. The ice looked fresh. That didn’t make sense: Enceladus, like our Moon, didn’t have an atmosphere, because it was too small, with too little gravity, to hold onto one – so wind and rain couldn’t have smoothed the surface. And, again, the models they had at the time said that a moon that small would be frozen solid right to the core.

Remember, size really matters when cooling down – a thimble of warm water cools down far faster than a swimming pool of the same temperature would. Earth has cooled down a lot since all the planets and moons emerged from the original disc of gas and dust that formed them. Enceladus, being so small (and so far out from the sun), would have cooled down far faster. And so he shouldn’t still have a molten core, or volcanic activity, or any of that exciting stuff that could melt the surface, fill in old craters, and generally freshen everything up.

A HELPFUL CHILD INQUIRES: Wouldn’t radioactivity heat up and melt the core, as the uranium in the rocks breaks down? Like happens on Earth?

ME, SMILING A FORCED SMILE AT THE CHILD: Yes the core of Enceladus, like that of the Earth, would also be heated by the slow and steady decay of uranium isotopes, and other radioactive elements; but by now, several billions of years after the formation of the planets and moons, with most of the most radioactive material already having decayed into stable (or semi-stable) isotopes, the tiny solid core of a world like Enceladus shouldn’t be generating enough heat to melt oceans.

Which meant this hint of a molten core was mysterious. So we sent another probe. Eventually.

CASSINI-HUYGENS

The fourth Saturn probe, Cassini-Huygens, was launched in 1997 (twenty years after both Voyagers had launched). Incidentally, imagine how frustrating that twenty-year wait must have been for scientists studying Saturn… Anyway, Cassini-Huygens finally arrived in the Saturn system in 2004. (Yeah, a seven-year flight… the solar system is BIG, and Saturn is FAR FROM ITS STAR.) And Cassini got much, much closer, with far better cameras… and discovered that not only did Enceladus somehow still have a molten core after several billion years, but he was squirting huge plumes of water into space from what turned out to be many, many cryovolcanoes – cold volcanoes made of ice that, instead of spewing molten rock, spewed molten, er, water.

That water, of course, evaporated as soon as it left the high pressure of the volcano for the no-pressure-at-all of space – and then immediately froze into tiny crystals of ice dust. Thus the sparkly plumes.

How huge were these plumes? Well, it turned out that the entire E-ring is made from the sparking frozen crystals of ice spewed out of Enceladus’s ice volcanoes.

Well, that was cool, but let’s do another circuit, swing by again from the south, and check out the south pole…

So Enceladus wasn’t just randomly orbiting in the middle of the E ring: it had made the E-ring, and was continuously replenishing it. (This had been guessed by Haff, Eviatar, and Siscoe back in 1983, and Pang, Voge, Rhoads, and Ajello in 1984: nice one!)

WHY, YES, I HAPPEN TO HAVE A COSMIC DUST ANALYZER RIGHT HERE

Astronomers have always been fascinated by Saturn’s bright rings of mystery dust, and so when they were designing the Cassini probe for this mission, they had outfitted it with a Cosmic Dust Analyser – a golden bucket full of sensors, designed to catch grains of dust and analyse the hell out of them as they exploded inside the bucket. (Why would grains of dust explode inside the bucket? Because Cassini was a probe sent by rocket from earth, and thus ended up orbiting Saturn at a pretty rapid clip: Cassini was moving at over 20 kilometres per second relative to the rings as she passed through them – which meant those grains of dust were hitting the bucket over thirty times faster than an F-16 jet fighter at full thrust.)

So Cassini flew through the E-ring again and again (and even flew briefly through the plumes themselves as they emerged from the volcanoes) and picked up a lot of particles of dust – and a lot of data on those particles. And yep, the dust particles that make up the E-ring turned out to be mostly frozen ice crystals from the ice volcanos of Enceladus – many of them salty, and therefore almost certainly from the liquid water ocean, miles underneath his frozen surface.

It’s taken years to analyse this data. (That’s because they keep coming up with new and more sophisticated software, and applying it to the original raw data to extract more information from it – a lovely example of genuine, ongoing progress in science.) But a paper landed in Nature yesterday last week last month back in June in June of last year (yes, I have been working on this post for 7 months now, God damn it to hell and back. Life, and other posts, and the masterclass with David Sloan Wilson, and attending the N2 Conference at Berkeley, and looking after my son solo while my wife Solana travelled, and Christmas holidays with family, and getting sick several times, most recently with some weird virus that still has me singing baritone and coughing convulsively weeks later, all took precedence over finishing this.)

 And the ice particles from deep inside Enceladus turned out to contain… (dramatic drum roll)… huge amounts of what you get when you boil an alchemist’s piss.

REMIND ME WHY THIS IS SO EXCITING

Sure. Bear in mind, you only need six core elements for organic life as we know it: Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur… and phosphorus. Yes, calcium is nice if you want to build, say, bones, but you don’t HAVE to build bones (bacteria don’t have bones, and they have been doing just fine for billions of years); yes, potassium is useful; yes, you can do a lot with sodium; etc etc… but those six are core. Nothing on Earth can live without those six.

But why, in particular, can life not exist without phosphorus? Well, partly because it forms the chemical zipper in every DNA molecule. But perhaps even more importantly, phosphorus is the P in ATP – adenosine triphosphate, chemical formula C₁₀H₁₆N₅O₁₃P₃ – the molecule that stores, carries and releases energy for every plant and animal on earth, with no exceptions. (They briefly thought there was a bacterium in one lake in California that could use arsenic rather than phosphorus to do the same job, at the expense of a lot of damage to other parts of the organism… turned out not to be the case. It’s phosphorus everywhere.)

THE ELEMENTS OF LIFE: FIVE DOWN, ONE TO GO…

So let’s run through that short list: Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulphur tend to be both abundant, and, for various reasons, through various channels, chemically available in water. Carbon, for instance, as carbon dioxide, LOVES to dissolve in water;  for evidence of how much carbon dioxide you can dissolve under mild pressure in a small amount of water, just crack open a Coke, Carlsburg, or Volvic.

Sure, nitrogen can be a bit tricky; N2 – two nitrogen atoms joined in a very strong triple bond – doesn’t want to dissolve in water; but NH3, or ammonia – a nitrogen atom and three hydrogens – dissolves very easily, and we have known since 2008 that Enceladus has ammonia in its liquid water oceans. (Ammonia in water also has another interesting property: it acts as antifreeze, allowing the water to stay liquid at much lower temperatures than it would otherwise. Another reason these oceans don’t freeze.)

So, for the past decade or so, phosphorus was considered the bottle-neck element for life on Enceladus (and, by extension, for life on icy moons generally), as all the other vital elements were known to be, or confidently assumed to be, dissolved in the water there. In 2018, the definitive paper on the subject, Is Extraterrestrial Life Suppressed on Subsurface Ocean Worlds due to the Paucity of Bioessential Elements?, by Lingam and Loeb (yes, that’s Abraham “Avi” Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, Director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, and former chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy), stated firmly that there would be far less than is found on Earth.

But why? The problem is, most of the phosphorus on Earth is locked into rocks, with strong bonds that do not want to dissolve in water. It is only the existence of life on earth that has created the chemical conditions whereby phosphorus is more freely available. Life has set up a phosphorus cycle, with fungi and bacteria removing phosphorus from those pesky insoluble rocks, thus making it available to life. 

If soluble forms of phosphorus tend to be MADE by life, then, in the absence of life, it was assumed there would be very little phosphorus available on Enceladus. Far less than on Earth.

But the new paper, having re-analysed the old Cassini data, shows that phosphorus is at least a hundred times more abundant in the liquid water ocean of Enceladus than in Earth’s own oceans.

One really obvious explanation for that might be: there is already life of some kind in the oceans of Enceladus, and that life has already set up a phosphorus cycle, keeping it available in water. Maybe there was indeed very little phosphorus in the water, a couple of billion years ago on a lifeless Enceladus. (And Lingam and Loeb would have been totally correct if they had published their paper in the year 2,000,000,000 BC.) But if life at some point began, in the warm, nutrient-rich waters around the hydrothermal vents which dot the Enceladus ocean floor, it could have slowly transformed the chemistry of Enceladus, just as life in our oceans transformed the chemistry of Earth.

However, that kind of wild leap is frowned upon severely in contemporary science – You Are Going Beyond the Data – so they have instead come up with a purely chemical explanation that doesn’t mention life at all.

They now think phosphorus on Enceladus is found in the form of orthophosphates, which dissolve easily in water. Where do the orthophosphates come from? Er, not totally sure. (On earth, orthophosphates can come from decaying plants, bacteria, etc – ie, life – but they can also come from weathered rock, and other purely chemical processes, so this keeps their options open.)

Anyway, it’s an incredibly clearcut result that demolishes the 2018 paper. They wrap up with a paragraph that, compared to most astrophysics papers, reads like a speech from Braveheart:

The stark contrast between earlier modelling and our results might be due to modelling assumptions that were based on scaling fluxes of the P cycle on the modern Earth to Enceladus¹⁵, not considering the fundamental differences between Earth and ocean-bearing moons. The most important differences are the much higher concentration of carbonate species in alkaline ocean water and the probable presence of unrecycled, equilibrated rocks at the seafloor of Enceladus^34,38 versus continuous production of more reactive seafloor basalts on Earth. Regardless of these theoretical considerations, with the finding of phosphates the ocean of Enceladus is now known to satisfy what is generally considered to be the strictest requirement of habitability.

“The stark contrast between earlier modelling and our results…”

“…the ocean of Enceladus is now known to satisfy what is generally considered to be the strictest requirement of habitability…”

Take that, you bastards!

So life on Enceladus is possible. (And, but whisper this, may indeed be present.) That’s already a big deal!

But this breakthrough, though delightful, raises bigger questions.

Why does Enceladus – tiny, and 1.5 billion kilometres from the sun, remember – have energetic ice-volcanoes that squirt so much water into space they’ve made a ring around Saturn? Water we now know is full of life-supporting phosphorus? And why are so many icy moons turning out to have molten cores, and thus liquid water oceans – oceans which are being fed nutrients through hydro-thermal vents fed by those molten cores? In other words, why are suitable conditions for life turning up all over the solar system – waaaaay outside the traditional, Earth-adjacent, “Goldilocks zone”, where the mainstream for decades assumed liquid water was confined? (Even Pluto is now believed to have a liquid water ocean beneath its frozen surface.)

Well, that’s a great question, or bunch of questions.  And as usual, there isn’t really a coherent answer, inside mainstream cosmology. Cosmology can’t really answer “why?” questions, because of its underlying unquestioned assumption that our universe is a one-shot, with random properties, and so everything that happens in it is essentially arbitrary and meaningless. But if you forced it to reply, cosmology’s explanation would be something like “a series of random and unlikely things that we did not predict seem to happen, again and again, that mysteriously lead to the conditions for life repeatedly occurring where we did not expect them to occur.”

Obviously, in the next two posts (or three, or four; this thing has grown absurdly long), I’m going to explore that series of “random" and "unlikely" things, and argue that it isn't random at all: the most parsimonious explanation is that it’s the result of an evolutionary process, at the level of universes, that optimises for conditions supportive to life, because life in turn makes for reproductively fit universes (through mechanisms I’ve explained elsewhere). The highly unlikely becomes extremely likely, in an evolved universe. And a theory that can give plausible explanations for otherwise highly unlikely things, plus a mechanism by which they could have come about, is a good theory…

But before I go, let me, more in sorrow than in anger,  rub the mainstream’s nose in its own poop one more time. (For its own good – how else will it learn?) They didn’t just think there would be a bit less phosphorus than is available in Earth’s oceans, they thought there should be MASSIVELY less. The study by Lingam and Loeb was remarkably sure (for a scientific paper) that the availability of phosphorus would be the bottleneck for life; indeed, that there would be less than is found on earth “by a few orders of magnitude”. (And that was only in 2018! We already had the data proving this thesis to be totally wrong, we simply hadn’t yet unpacked it!)  Instead there is MORE, by two orders of magnitude. So the mainstream was wrong, again, by at least five orders of magnitude. Just make a mental note of that, because how badly (and confidently) wrong Harvard astronomers get this shit is rapidly memory-holed once the new data comes in.

Oh, and this five-orders-of-magnitude error isn’t because Avi Loeb is a closed-minded guy! (I’m not going to pick on Lingam because he is way younger and less experienced.) Loeb is so open-minded his brain sometimes falls out! I really like the guy, while thinking he is wrong about almost everything; he’s the kind of completely bananas scientist we need more of, just to shake things up a bit. Gene Wilder could definitely play him in a movie, although he might have to tone him down a bit to keep it believable.

The thing is, Loeb is a serious scientist; he’s done great things. Back in 2003, he was one of the first people to speculate about direct collapse supermassive black holes, in a paper written with Volker Bromm. He founded the excellent Black Hole Initiative in 2016! I love the Black Hole Initiative! The first big, global, interdisciplinary centre to focus obsessively on the study of black holes.

No, Loeb has slowly gone nuts in the way only Harvard professors, isolated in the high, thin air at the very top of the academic dominance hierarchy, can go nuts. (When you don’t think you really have peers any more, then there’s no one to give you feedback. See also: Timothy Leary.) He thought the weird tumbling rock ʻOumuamua, that passed through our solar system recently, was probably an alien probe (it almost certainly wasn’t), and he thinks that metal nodules found on the seafloor after a meteor impact might have been made by the disintegration of an alien spacecraft. (They almost certainly weren’t.) He’s probably wrong on all these big calls, but he’s exploring a much broader possibility space than his critics, and I like that. Hell, he criticises mainstream science about the universe almost as hard as I do, albeit from a different angle:

“My message is that something is wrong with the scientific community today in terms of its health.

Too many scientists are now mostly motivated by ego, by getting honors and awards, by showing their colleagues how smart they are. They treat science as a monologue about themselves rather than a dialogue with nature. They build echo chambers using students and postdocs who repeat their mantras so that their voice will be louder and their image will be promoted. But that’s not the purpose of science. Science is not about us; it’s not about empowering ourselves or making our image great. It’s about trying to understand the world...”
–Abraham “Avi” Loeb, in Scientific American

I even love the fact that he delivered that quote, completely straight-faced, in the same interview where he also said:

“I’ve been doing interviews with, for example, Good Morning Britain at 1:50 A.M. and Coast to Coast AM at 3 A.M.—plus appearances on U.S. network and cable television. I’ve got about 100 podcast interviews to do in the next few weeks. And I already recorded long conversations with [podcasters] Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan for their shows.”
–the same Abraham “Avi” Loeb, also in Scientific American

So, you know, he is exactly the kind of guy who would be up for discovering life on other worlds. Almost too up for it! And yet, even he gets it spectacularly wrong. Why? Well, with this error, he was just betrayed by cosmology’s unexamined dogmas, like everyone else in the mainstream. Without taking an evolutionary approach, you are going to constantly misinterpret things like icy-moons-with-liquid-water-oceans, by assuming all the values of everything else will be independent of that fact.

But the simple fact that such icy moons are full of liquid water, when all the surrounding circumstances say that should be highly unlikely (and it would be highly unlikely, in a random/arbitrary universe), means you are probably now in a territory where evolutionary fine-tuning has occurred. In an evolved universe, if the BIG thing that supports life has unexpectedly turned up (liquid water, a billion and a half kilometers away from the sun), then the little things, like dissolved and available phosphorus, are very likely to turn up, too.

That is, an icy moon with a liquid water ocean is likely to be a fine-tuned, evolved system, not a random rock. (Similarly, an asteroid of similar mass to Enceladus, and at a similar distance from our sun, with NO liquid water on it IS likely to be a random rock, and no startlingly unlikely chemistry is to be expected.)

“Unlikely” fine-tuned chemistry that is conducive to life is, in fact, likely on icy moons with liquid water oceans – just as “unlikely” fine-tuned chemistry that is conducive to life is, in fact, likely inside the cells of the human body.

DOGMA VERSUS CATMA

Put another way:

Unexamined dogma: This is a one-shot universe, in which matter with random qualities blindly obeys arbitrary laws.

Enlightened catma: This is an evolved universe, in which (over the course of many, many earlier generations of universe) matter itself has evolved so as to be conducive to life. Chemistry evolved; evolution itself evolved. Icy moons evolved.

An icy moon, in this universe, is therefore like a lung, or a kidney – no, wait, they’re too big for this analogy – OK, perhaps more accurately, an alveolus (tiny air sac), or a white blood cell, in a mammal. It’s a tiny, sophisticated, evolved sub-system that (once the individual universe/mammal has been born), develops efficiently, and maintains itself stably over its lifetime, with energy supplied from elsewhere in the organism.

It’s not a random dead object with arbitrary properties. It’s better thought of as a system, or a process, or an organ. (One of many such.) And it’s doing a job, efficiently. (Or at least, with the fuzzy, improvisational, semi-efficiency of any evolved natural system. It satisfices.)

But Lingam and Loeb are stuck with their unexamined dogma.

This is from the Lingam and Loeb abstract

The availability of bioessential elements for "life as we know it", such as phosphorus (P) or possibly molybdenum (Mo), is expected to restrict the biological productivity of extraterrestrial biospheres. Here, we consider worlds with subsurface oceans and model the dissolved concentrations of bioessential elements. In particular, we focus on the sources and sinks of P (available as phosphates) and find that the average steady-state oceanic concentration of P is likely to be lower than the corresponding value on Earth by a few orders of magnitude, provided that the oceans are alkaline and possess hydrothermal activity.

Well, the ocean on Enceladus is indeed alkaline, and possesses A LOT of hydrothermal activity (to the point that volcanoes are blasting water into space!) – and it nonetheless contains two order of magnitude more phosphorus than the oceans of Earth, not “a few orders of magnitude” less.

As I have said a bunch of times before, all of cosmology’s errors lean in the same direction.

BUT WAIT, NO, HERE COMES THE CAVALRY!

OK; my conscience is nagging at me here: I’ve got to mention, for the sake of fairness, a terrific paper that leans in the other direction: in 2022, Jihua Hao/郝记华, Christopher R. Glein, the wonderful geologist Robert Hazen and others wrote a paper directly contradicting Lingam and Loeb, and predicting lots of available phosphorus in the liquid water ocean of Enceladus:

“Here, we perform geochemical modeling, constrained by Cassini data, to predict how much phosphorus could be present in the Enceladus ocean. These models suggest that Enceladus’s ocean should be relatively rich in dissolved phosphorus. This means that there can now be greater confidence that the ocean of Enceladus is habitable.”
–from Abundant phosphorus expected for possible life in Enceladus’s ocean

How come they got it right? Because Robert Hazen, and some of the younger scientists he mentors and works with – such as Jihua Hao, and the splendid Michael L. Wong (a wonderful astrobiologist who also hosts Strange New Worlds: A Science & Star Trek Podcast)– are among the noble few who do seem to understand there is something wrong, not just with the details of the current paradigm, but with the unexamined dogmas underlying the paradigm. That we are missing something vital, and fundamental, which keeps throwing us off in the same direction.

Knowing there is a problem deep beneath the paradigm, they are able to come up with original papers, attacking the problem from original angles. Read, for example, Michael Wong’s excellent recent paper (written with Carol E. Cleland, Daniel Arend Jr., Stuart Bartlett, H. James Cleaves II, Heather Demarest, Anirudh Prabhu, Jonathan I. Lunine, and, yes, Robert Hazen), On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems, which starts off:

“The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws do not seem to adequately describe these systems.”
–from On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems

Bold! (Yes, the paper blurs together evolution-meaning-development, and evolution-meaning-Darwinian-evolution, which makes it hard for them to see the problem clearly, but it’s still a great paper.) Check it out…

Oh, and meanwhile, while I was writing this post, researchers using new software tools have found hydrogen cyanide (a very important precursor for life) in the plumes ejected from Enceladus.

 And also salts and organics on Ganymede (Jupiter’s biggest moon, and indeed the biggest moon in the solar system – it’s bigger than Mercury, or Pluto).

See? If the BIG stuff allowing for life is there, the small stuff is likely to follow. They aren’t going to turn out to be randomly distributed. They are going to turn out to be clustered.

AN EVOLVED CHEMICAL LOGIC

Why? Because there is an evolved chemical logic to liquid water that means – once it is present in large quantities for a decent period of time – it transforms its wider chemical environment into one conducive to life. This is possible because the elements aren’t just a bunch of random things with arbitrary properties, any more than all the varied and different parts of a Rolls Royce jet engine, separated and laid out on a hanger floor, are random things with arbitrary properties. Chemistry is instead an evolved, integrated system. And it has been – somewhat messily, and wastefully, but nonetheless successfully – designed by evolution to perform several important, specific, interlocking tasks, one of which is to facilitate the development of life (because life ultimately makes for more reproductively successful universes). And so, once enough water is present, the evolved logic of an evolved chemistry plays out – whether that is on the surface of a small, rocky planet like Earth, or deep under the icy surface of a tiny moon, like Enceladus.

AAAAAAAAaaaaannnnd… I’m going to abruptly stop this absurdly long post here, because I’ve just looked down, and gotten vertigo. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of words to go, and a lot of ideas that need a bit of space and time for the reader to take on board, and it doesn’t make sense putting them all into one post. Nobody with a normal human bladder would get to the end of it. (I’m amazed and delighted you got this far! Thank you for trusting me with so much of your time. Go dump a few grams of phosphorus, and stretch.)

Anyway, I hope this line sounds a little more exciting (and packed with meaning, and possibility) now than it did back at the start of this post: There is phosphorus on Enceladus!

Hail Eris!

As our problems grow (because there is clearly a basic flaw underlying our entire paradigm), we have to throw more and more Dark Matter at those problems, to make them (temporarily) go away. As a result, Dark Matter now makes up 26.8% of the mass energy of the universe. (The precision of the .8 is nice, huh? Very reassuring.)

But Dark Matter isn’t enough to solve our problems (because the true problem lies deep, and unexamined, in the heart of the theory itself), and so of course Dark Matter leads to the even harder stuff, Dark Energy. And so Dark Energy now makes up two thirds of the mass-energy of the universe. Sorry, Dark Energy now makes up 68.3% of the mass-energy of the universe. Can’t forget the .3! Got to reassure the media, and the funding bodies, and – above all – ourselves, that we have measured that new invisible thing we just made up (that will solve all our problems) extremely precisely – just as precisely as the old invisible thing we made up (that somehow failed to solve all our problems).

So, ordinary matter is down to 4.9% of the universe. (Not 5%: four-point-nine. Deeply reassuring precision.) If we keep going at this rate, ordinary matter – all the ACTUAL STARS AND PLANETS AND GALAXIES AND GAS AND DUST WE CAN ACTUALLY SEE, AND THAT WE KNOW TO EXIST – will soon be a rounding error, and the scientists will be able to disregard it entirely, with a sigh of relief, and get to work on an entirely theoretical universe made of matter you can't see, acted on by forces you can't feel, with everything placed wherever you’d like it to be, because nobody can see it to contradict you.

Look! The Emperor’s New Universe! Isn’t it beautiful, children!

EDIT: I got some excellent feedback, and criticism, below in the comments. So if you don’t like this post, no problem – go read the comments, where there is a lively discussion of all that is wrong with it. And thank you again to everybody who took the time to give me feedback on this experiment! Extremely helpful.

A QUICK REFRESHER, SO YOU GET THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF THIS PAPER:

Remember, astronomers slowly discovered, over the past few decades, to their great surprise, that pretty much every galaxy they looked at in detail turned out to have a supermassive black hole lurking at its centre.

Now, by the time we made that discovery, we already knew how normal, ordinary, decent, law-abiding, tax-paying, not-supermassive black holes formed: When a large star ran out of fuel and collapsed, its outer layers rebounded and blew away in a supernova explosion – but its core kept on collapsing, to form a stellar-mass black hole that might weigh anything from three times the mass of our own sun to roughly fifty times the mass. That’s satisfyingly chunky, sure, but it’s not supermassive.

Because many of the supermassive black holes found at the centre of galaxies weighed millions of times, and even billions of times, the mass of our sun.  A star a million times bigger than our sun (let alone a billion times bigger) wasn’t even theoretically possible, so how the hell did they form?

And so mainstream cosmology scrambled around to explain how these supermassive black holes could form in the time available. And the original mainstream answer, for many years, was that lots and LOTS and LOTS of relatively small stellar-mass black holes must, somehow, randomly collide and slowly combine to form these magnificent beasts, which then continue to grow by pulling in lots of gas due to their immense gravity.

Note, that requires the stars to form first, and eventually burn out and collapse, to make small black holes, which join to form larger ones, and eventually build supermassive black holes. Classic mainstream cosmology: a slow, bottom-up, random process – with stars coming first, and supermassive black holes a slow and distant second.

But – even before the James Webb Space Telescope – as astronomers looked further and further back in time, towards the Big Bang, they kept finding really fucking big supermassive black holes, and they started to run out of time for slowly and randomly assembling them from lots and lots of small stellar-mass black holes.

So nearly 20 years ago, a few gutsy scientists, including Mitchell C. Begelman, Marta Volonteri, Martin Rees, Volker Bromm, and Priyamvada Natarajan, came up with, and developed, the idea of direct collapse supermassive black holes. These formed directly, in that they went straight from gas to black hole, without ever making stars. How? From the collapse of an immense area of the incredibly smooth and featureless gas (roughly 75% hydrogen, 25% helium – and only the very faintest, negligible traces of anything else) that comprised the early, expanding universe; gas so smooth and even that it contained no areas of higher density from which to nucleate stars as it collapsed. (Imagine, by analogy, a perfectly even cloud of distilled water in a totally windless sky; a cloud that contained no dust motes to nucleate raindrops, and which instead just eventually formed, and dropped, one single giant raindrop…)

My prediction that, in an evolved universe, you would expect to find direct collapse supermassive black holes forming first, and then generating the conditions for galaxy formation around themselves, drew heavily on those scientists’ mathematical proof that such direct collapse was possible. But it was basically a fringe theory. Until now.

BREAKTHROUGH

Last month (on November 6th 2023), a new paper by Ákos Bogdán, Andy D. Goulding, Priyamvada Natarajan, and a bunch of other good people …ah, why not go full Oscars speech on this, and name everybody? They don’t get nearly enough enough glory for doing this fascinating, much-misunderstood, unfairly obscure work: Orsolya Kovacs! Grant Tremblay! (who wrote both the Smithsonian-published history Light from the Void: Twenty Years of Discovery with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (with Belinda Wilkes and Martin Weisskopf), and (with middle-grade teacher Katie Coppens), the slightly more accessible and fart-joke-filled What do Black Holes Eat for Dinner? – sample fact, what happens to pee in space: “it would boil, then freeze”), Urmila Chadayammuri! The legendary Marta Volonteri, co-author of one of the earliest papers on this subject, back in 2006! Ralph Kraft! William Forman! Christine Jones! Eugene Churazov! Irina Zhuravleva! …where were we? Yes, this new paper was published in Nature, announcing the discovery of the earliest known supermassive black hole to date, only 470 million years after the Big Bang. (So, when the universe was only 3% of its current age.) But here’s the killer detail: That extremely early supermassive black hole is as massive as all the stars in the galaxy around it added together.

It can’t have slowly assembled from enormous numbers of smaller, stellar-mass black holes – from enormous numbers of collapsed stars – because there weren’t nearly enough stars at that point, with the universe only 3% of its current age. The mass of the central supermassive black hole, compared to the mass of the surrounding stars, is totally out of balance.

Bear in mind, in our local neighbourhood, over 13 billion years later, the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies weigh, on average, only 0.1% as much as all the stars in their galaxy. They are BIG, but the mass of stars is a thousand times bigger. (Because, by now, after many billions of years of star formation, mature spiral galaxies, say, can contain from tens of billions to trillions of stars.) And that ratio of star mass to central black hole mass – very roughly a thousand to one  – is remarkably consistent.

But THIS (extremely early) supermassive black hole weighs, at minimum, as much as ten million suns, and may well be as heavy as a hundred million suns. So, say forty or fifty million. And that’s a conservative estimate, given the data! They’ve rounded it down, a lot, to be super-careful! While all the stars of its surrounding galaxy, added together, only add up to the mass of very roughly forty million suns. (That’s a bit of a guess of course, as it’s hard to judge at such a distance, but it’s unlikely to be out by a HUGE amount.) They are roughly the same mass!

Put another way, this galaxy is still in the very early stages of formation – and yet the central supermassive black hole is already mature.

Put another way, the supermassive black hole is already of roughly the kind of size we see in the contemporary universe, in our neighbourhood; but the stars in this early galaxy are much smaller in number – and much more tightly grouped – than we see in the galaxies around us that have such large black holes.

Put yet another way; here we have a supermassive black hole that is a THOUSAND TIMES MORE MASSIVE, in relation to the mass of all the stars around it, than those in our local universe.

So this is a SPECTACULAR result, with hugely positive implications for the theories being explored here on The Egg and the Rock.

And of course this is a massive result, not just for me and the Evolved Universe Hypothesis, but for Mitchell C. Begelman, Marta Volonteri, Martin Rees, Volker Bromm, Priyamvada Natarajan and others, who argued, almost twenty years ago (in the teeth of great skepticism at the time) that direct collapse supermassive black holes were possible.

I predicted back in July last year that several of these people would one day get a Nobel Prize for that work. My confidence in that prediction has just gone up. Put money on it, if you can.

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Anyway, here is the abstract from that new paper in Nature. (And yes, if lines like “This heavily obscured quasar with a bolometric luminosity of Lbol ~5 × 10^45 erg s^−1 harbours an ~10^7−10^8 M⊙ BH assuming accretion at the Eddington limit” leave you baffled and with a headache, feel free to skip it.)

Below it, I have translated it into English and added my comments, spelling out some of its implications, and making some predictions. (Nature has paywalled it, so here is the earlier version, free to read on Arxiv.)

ABSTRACT, BABY, ABSTRACT, BABY, ABSTRACT! THAT’S WHERE IT’S AT!

Evidence for heavy-seed origin of early supermassive black holes from a z ≈ 10 X-ray quasar

by Ákos Bogdán, Andy D. Goulding, Priyamvada Natarajan, Orsolya E. Kovács, Grant R. Tremblay, Urmila Chadayammuri, Marta Volonteri, Ralph P. Kraft, William R. Forman, Christine Jones, Eugene Churazov & Irina Zhuravleva

ABSTRACT:

Observations of quasars reveal that many supermassive black holes (BHs) were in place less than 700 Myr after the Big Bang. However, the origin of the first BHs remains a mystery. Seeds of the first BHs are postulated to be either light (that is, 10−100 M⊙), remnants of the first stars, or heavy (that is, 10^4 − 10^5 M⊙), originating from the direct collapse of gas clouds. Here, harnessing recent data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, we report the detection of an X-ray-luminous massive BH in a gravitationally lensed galaxy identified by the James Webb Space Telescope at redshift z ≈ 10.3 behind the cluster lens Abell 2744. This heavily obscured quasar with a bolometric luminosity of Lbol ~5 × 10^45 erg s^−1 harbours an ~10^7−10^8 M⊙ BH assuming accretion at the Eddington limit. This mass is comparable to the inferred stellar mass of its host galaxy, in contrast to what is found in the local Universe wherein the BH mass is ~0.1% of the host galaxy’s stellar mass. The combination of such a high BH mass and large BH-to-galaxy stellar mass ratio just ~500 Myr after the Big Bang was theoretically predicted and is consistent with a picture wherein BHs originated from heavy seeds.

Or, to put that in English: they were able to observe an extremely distant, early galaxy, because its tiny, dim image was magnified greatly by the gravitational lens formed by a much nearer galaxy cluster (Abell 2744). The James Webb Space Telescope was able to observe how bright that distant, early galaxy was in the infrared: that is, it could see the dim, low-energy, redshifted light from its stars. But they also pointed the Chandra X-ray telescope at it. The Chandra can detect all the very high-energy light which the James Webb can’t see. And so the Chandra was able to see the, far more energetic, X-rays coming from its central supermassive black hole (as highly excited gas circled it at close to the speed of light), which allowed us to estimate the mass of that central supermassive black hole. And it turns out the central black hole weighs as much as all the stars in the young, rapidly-forming galaxy around it.

Going into this, we had two theories about how the supermassive central black holes in galaxies formed; one was as a small initial seed from a star collapse (which over time would grow larger by feeding on gas and other small black holes). One was as a much larger, heavier, initial seed, from a direct collapse of a much larger amount of gas. This is extremely strong evidence for the latter.

Absolute killer paper, right? You never get evidence this strong and direct.

THOUGHTS, AND PREDICTIONS (SOME OF THEM ALL SHINY AND NEW!)

OK, in the light of this excellent new paper, here are my thoughts – a mixture of observation, interpretation, and prediction. (Obviously I’m drawing here on my version of an evolved universe theory, which is based on, and extends, Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection, plus some more recent and wonderful work by Clément Vidal, John Smart, Michael E. Price, and Louis Crane. But the wilder guesses, and any fuckups therein, are all mine.)

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES FORM FIRST

Well, my own expansion of Smolin’s theory has predicted all along that supermassive black holes must form first, in extremely large numbers, before galaxies – and then generate the galaxies around themselves (by stimulating rapid star formation). That’s because supermassive black holes are primary and fundamental, in evolutionary terms – they are the one thing that reproductively successful universes along our direct evolutionary line must have been able to do from the very earliest generations of universe – and will have been conserved from such early, primitive universes. The much smaller, and more numerous, stellar-collapse black holes that we see in our universe are secondary, in evolutionary terms; they are a later (and highly reproductively successful!) mutation, which cannot precede supermassive black holes in the developmental unfolding of our specific universe, any more than the (recently evolved) prefrontal cortex could precede the (evolutionarily ancient) heart in the developmental unfolding of my son Arlo. This new paper reinforces that belief/prediction.

Before we move on, I want to spell this out again in boring detail, because it’s important: There are many highly successful animals with a heart, but no prefrontal cortex (for example, all fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, plus many mammals). There are no animals at all with a prefrontal cortex but no heart. That’s simply the logic of evolution, which builds on its earlier successes. The evolution of the prefrontal cortex requires the, much earlier, evolution of the heart; the reverse, however, is not the case. Likewise, I’m arguing that the logic of evolution ensures there can be many successful universes (in our universe’s evolutionary line) which produce supermassive black holes, while not producing the more complex structure that is a galaxy of stars and its vast numbers of associated stellar-mass black holes; but there can be no universes which produce galaxies of stars and their vast numbers of associated stellar-mass black holes while not producing supermassive black holes.

A TECHNICAL SIDE NOTE, because some people have asked about this (feel free to skip): Yes, such very early supermassive black holes could, theoretically, be formed in one of two different ways, at two different times. They could either be primordial – that is, could be formed in the first fraction of a second of incredibly rapid inflation after the Big Bang, when mass/energy density was absurdly high – or they could be formed at some point in the many, many millions of years that follow, by the direct collapse of giant gas clouds, as the universe continues to expand. My bet is on their formation by direct collapse of smooth gas clouds, somewhere in the first 100 million years – and probably well inside the first 50 million years – because such ultra-smooth (but not PERFECTLY smooth) gas clouds look to me to be optimised (by evolution) for such large-scale direct collapse. But if they turned out to be primordial, and generated in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, perhaps deep inside the very first second, by inflation, that would be fine by me too (they could still drive galaxy formation): I just think it’s less likely, and there is less evidence for it. OK, end of aside. Back to my predictions.

GALAXIES FORM AROUND THOSE DIRECT COLLAPSE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES

So, galaxies don’t form bottom-up, with small numbers of stars forming, then merging, then merging again with other small clusters, to eventually come together to form galaxies. The majority of galaxies are born fully formed and structured – that is, not from random fragments – building outwards from the active galactic nucleus generated by the initial direct collapse supermassive black hole (which creates the conditions for rapid early star formation). Which leads on to my next prediction…

STAR FORMATION RATES ARE FAR HIGHER, FAR EARLIER, THAN THE MAINSTREAM HAS ASSUMED

Currently, star formation rates are seen as peaking around two to three billion years after the Big Bang (at what is often called Cosmic High Noon). I’m going to argue that this will turn out not to be the case: sure, star formation rates are high at that point, but star formation will be found to be even faster right at the start, in the first three to four hundred million years after the Big Bang (and starting just after the generation, well within the first fifty million years, of a huge wave of direct collapse supermassive black holes).

Star formation in the first billion years has been underestimated for several reasons: Firstly and most obviously, we simply had no data from the first billion years, until the James Webb Space Telescope came along, because, before then, all the light from that era was so redshifted, our existing telescopes couldn’t detect it. (As I have explained in depth, both on this website and in The Irish Times, the James Webb Space Telescope is a goddamn technological miracle.) So before last year, we were guessing; scientists were literally in the dark.

And, crucially, they built their guesses on a false foundation: the assumption that our universe was a one-shot universe, with no history before the Big Bang – and certainly no evolutionary history; that it was thus made of matter with random properties, blindly obeying arbitrary laws. In such a universe, progress towards order would indeed be chaotic, slow, random, accidental; galaxies should indeed form in a gradual and halting process, from the bottom up, with small patches of stars clumsily and randomly assembled by gravity into larger ensembles with chaotic shapes, and only much later, somehow, finding the spiral forms we see all around us in the present day universe.

If, however, our universe was instead the result of a long, Darwinian, evolutionary process at the level of universes, with the basic parameters of matter fine-tuned by evolution for rapid early galaxy formation (and thus reproductive success), none of these assumptions would be true. And so it is turning out to be.

Another reason they underestimated early star formation rates is that – if I am right, and direct collapse supermassive black holes drive intense star formation in the early universe by enriching and shocking the gas in their immediate environment, optimising it for star formation, as well as, of course, acting as powerful gravitational attractors – those galaxies will start off incredibly compact. The earliest stars in those galaxies are being generated near the central supermassive black hole (and as a direct result of the influence of the supermassive black hole). They won’t cover much sky. And remember, this is the very early universe, it hasn’t expanded much yet, everything is pretty close together and the gas is still pretty dense compared to our massively expanded and thinned-out current state. So large quantities of gas and dust will obscure the star-making centre of the galaxy, near the supermassive black hole.

AND THIS IS ALSO TURNING OUT TO BE TRUE! Another great paper, by Carolina Andonie, David M Alexander, Claire Greenwell, Annagrazia Puglisi, et al, published two months back in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, shows that huge amounts of gas and dust in the early universe may be obscuring the central quasars in rapidly forming galaxies.

REMIND ME AGAIN WHAT A QUASAR IS

Sure. Remember, the quasar is the ultra-hot-spot at the centre of some galaxies (particularly early ones), where gas accelerates close to the speed of light as it is pulled towards, and rotates around (and ultimately vanishes into) the central supermassive black hole, causing the gas to give off x-rays, and shoot out jets of charged particles at close to light speed, as it spins closer and closer to the supermassive black hole. That spinning donut of gas around the central black hole is called the accretion disc: mainstream theories had assumed that only the gas and dust in the (relatively small and tight) accretion disc could be obscuring the central quasar. Which meant we should be able to see most quasars. Corollary: if you didn’t see a quasar, there was no quasar. So, because we couldn’t see many quasars in the first couple of billion years after the Big Bang, there were no quasars back then.

But it turns out there can be huge amounts of thick dust and gas in early galaxies (not just in the small, tight accretion disc, but throughout the galaxy), which obscure the quasar – and also obscure many of the new stars forming close to the quasar.  So again there has been a severe undercount of star formation rates in early galaxies – and an under-appreciation of the role quasars play in that star formation. As I (modest cough) predicted.

The thing is, if I am right, then these early, powerful quasars only tend to come into full view once most of the dust and gas has been used up, and turned into stars; this is why most astronomers currently claim that quasars, and active galactic nuclei more generally, quench star formation – because they only get a clear view of the quasar once most of the star formation is over. But papers like this may start to win them over to my approach.

Here’s that paper (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 527, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages L144–L150), if you want to dive deeper:

Obscuration beyond the nucleus: infrared quasars can be buried in extreme compact starbursts 

And here is a (slightly more reader friendly) Space-dot-com article on the paper, with lots of juicy quotes like this:

"This quasar-blocking dust was actually a surprise. We were not expecting to observe this."

And this:

The team's findings suggest there may be more quasars in the universe than believed. Many star-forming stars may be harboring active supermassive black holes at their hearts and blocking their emissions of the quasars, the study suggests.

And this:

"It is possible that some of these galaxies that we didn't think have quasars at their center are hiding a quasar that we just can't see in optical light."

Note again, above, the return of my favourite phrase, the one you see again and again because all our errors in cosmology lean in the same direction: 

“We were not expecting to observe this."

What do you mean we, kemo sabe? I will quietly remind you again of the prediction I made on quasars, and supermassive black holes, before the James Webb Space Telescope had released any data at all:

As a result, galaxies will form efficiently, and early. I argue that huge numbers of supermassive black holes and their quasars will be blazing away merrily, well inside the first fifty million years. There will be absolutely loads of recognisable, rapidly growing (rapidly star-forming) galaxies within the first 100 million years (probably much sooner). This is earlier than the mainstream have traditionally assumed. (They keep having to shuffle a bit further back, as they find new quasars, and their galaxies, ever further back in time. But they are pushed there, reluctantly, against the logic of their paradigm; I am leaping there, exultantly, because my paradigm predicts it.)

So the James Webb Space Telescope will basically see galaxies with active galactic nuclei (ie, quasars and jets) all the way back, because those active nuclei come first and are what form galaxies.

Quasars are fairly rare now; I am arguing that they will turn out to be ubiquitous in the very earliest stages of the universe because they are the engines that build out galaxies.

–Me, on July 8th 2022, getting my predictions out in public before the James Webb Space Telescope had released any data

Yeah, this has been an INCREDIBLY good month for the evolved universe hypothesis.

Oh, one last thing…

LOOK FOR THE X-RAYS

So here’s my big tip for the astronomers: When you find small, dense, early galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope, glowing away in the infrared, and clearly making stars at a rapid pace, please point Chandra in their direction, and look at them again in the x-ray range. I predict you will, again and again, find they already contain impressively large supermassive black holes, merrily accreting gas and blasting out x-rays – and driving that star formation. These are supermassive black holes which you will not be able to easily see in the infrared which the James Webb Space Telescope is calibrated to detect, because the light in that frequency range is being obscured by much larger amounts of dust and gas than anticipated. OK, go get ’em, tigers!

GOOD TIMES!

Well, that was fun. Please pass this on to your cosmologist, astrophysicist, and astronomer friends, and to any science journalists you know, so that we can put an end to this irritating, endless “Nobody predicted this…” shite, every time something we predicted, in detail, turns out to be true.

Evolved Universe theory for the win!

Comments and feedback welcome…

The conference is being held, over three days, to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of that wonderful idea (and terrible word), the Noosphere, thought up by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1923.

The group running the conference, Human Energy, define the Noosphere thus: 

The Noosphere is the sphere of thought enveloping the Earth. The word comes from the Greek noos (mind) and sphaira (sphere). The Noosphere is the third stage of Earth's development, after the geosphere (think rocks, water, and air) and the biosphere (all the living things).

Yeah, I still prefer my wife Solana Joy’s alternative and more self-explanatory term: the Thinkysphere. But it should be a great conference.

Conference speakers will include Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired, and author of many marvellous books, like Out of Control, and What Technology Wants); Jaron Lanier (futurist, composer, technologist; one of the inventors of Virtual Reality; author of You Are Not a Gadget, Who Owns the Future?, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, etc.), Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal, and Why Buddhism is True, etc), plus scientists and authors like David Sloan Wilson, Ilia Delio, Brian Swimme, Francis Heylighen, Shima Beigi, and many others.

More information on the conference here.

HELP ME WITH MY TALK

I want to try out my 25 minute talk in advance, so I’m going to invite all my paid subscribers to a Zoom call at 6pm Central European Time this Sunday (November 12th, 2023). That should be 9am in LA/SF, noon on the US East coast, and 5pm UK/Ireland. (Bedtime in India, and the middle of the night for Australians, sorry; blame the world for being round...)

I’ll try out my talk on you, and get your feedback. Plus I’ll bring you up to date on everything Egg and the Rock related, and you can ask me anything. A fairly relaxed, general chat. (I might record it, if that’s OK. If it works out well and seems interesting, I might post it later for free subscribers.)

This is for paid subscribers only, partly because I can’t afford the fees for a Zoom room with, potentially, all 7,000 free subscribers, and partly because I want to say thanks directly to the paid subscribers for their support.

(ASIDE: If you WERE a paid subscriber and have let it lapse, no problem, I still feel I owe you, and I would still like to include you in the Zoom call. No need to reactivate your paid subscription, just answer this email, or mention in the comments that you’d like a Zoom invite, and I’ll add you.)

So, all paid subscribers (and some ex-paid) should get an email containing a Zoom invite tomorrow. (And yes, sure, if you convert to a paid subscription today, I will invite you tomorrow.)

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OR WE COULD MEET HERE, IN REAL LIFE…

Thanks to the conference, I will be in San Francisco from November 15^th till November 23^rd, and it would be nice to meet up with Bay Area subscribers (free and paid alike!) while I am there. Maybe on Thursday (November 16^th 2023), at 6pm, in, let’s see… How about Vesuvio Cafe? (255 Columbus Avenue, North Beach, San Francisco CA 94133-4508) (Though, warning, I may be horribly jet-lagged.) If you arrive early, I will be across Jack Kerouac Alley, browsing in City Lights Bookstore. (My wife Solana Joy used to work in City Lights, so I have fond memories of visiting her there, and getting the staff discount when buying David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity in hardback…)

And, of course, feel free to pass this post on to any Bay Area friends who might enjoy any of this…

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OK, that’s it for now. See some of you by Zoom on Sunday, and others in Vesuvio this coming Thursday, I hope…

BACKGROUND:

I recently (to my great surprise and delight!) realised that the evolved universe theory that I am developing here automatically generates the extremely peculiar structure of our universe. That is, Darwinian evolution at the level of universes can explain why the vast majority of our specific universe is hostile to life, while small islands of chemical complexity (like Earth) are extremely hospitable to life. It’s not random, and it’s not inexplicable: it’s a logical consequence of evolution at the level of universes, if universes reproduce, with slight variation and inheritance, through black holes giving birth to big bangs. (The form of reproduction Lee Smolin argues for in his theory of cosmological natural selection, which my evolved universe theory builds on.)

This is, to put it mildly, a hell of breakthrough for the book, and I have been wandering around in a warm glow, like a guy in a Ready Brek ad, ever since.

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The realisation came while I was browsing what I still think of as Twitter (though Elon Musk has changed so many features – including allowing edits, extremely long tweets, and peeing in other people’s pockets for eight bucks – that it is no longer really Twitter, it’s an entirely new platform; so yeah, I should probably call it X now).

One of the cosmologists I follow there is Will Kinney, Professor of Physics at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). He specialises in the structure and origin of the universe, he’s the author of An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe, and he really knows his stuff. (I mean, I think he’s wrong about a bunch of that stuff, because I think everybody is wrong about that stuff, but he is totally on top of the current reductionist materialist mainstream model of the universe.) He’s also an extremely grumpy old man (or enjoys pretending to be an extremely grumpy old man; it’s certainly a fun persona that works well on Twitter, sorry, X). Will never engages with me (he probably, and perfectly understandably given his background, thinks I’m a nut), but I still like trying to engage with him, partly because he asks such interesting questions. (He’s not interested in your answers, unless you are another grumpy old man, because he is, well, a grumpy old man, but the questions are great.)

And recently he tweeted this:

Which is a terrific tweet, worth unpacking. For those of you unfamiliar with the Anthropic Principle, let’s just raid Wikipedia:

The anthropic principle, also known as the "observation selection effect", is the hypothesis, first proposed in 1957 by Robert Dicke, that the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations could happen only in a universe capable of developing intelligent life. Proponents of the anthropic principle argue that it explains why the universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life, since if either had been different, no one would have been around to make observations. Anthropic reasoning is often used to deal with the idea that the universe seems to be finely tuned for the existence of life.

The anthropic principle has always been a fairly half-arsed and philosophically naive attempt to explain why our universe contains orderly and highly complex living things, for many reasons, which I will address more fully in another post. (Lee Smolin and the distinguished father of string theory Leonard Susskind had a ding-dong online battle about the anthropic principle back in 2004, which is well worth a read.) Anyway, there are a bunch of versions of the anthropic principle, and, as the philosopher Nick Bostrom has dryly pointed out,

Many 'anthropic principles' are simply confused.

But Kinney’s tweet gets to the heart of an interesting problem that most versions of the principle overlook.

Why is so much of this universe – the vast majority of it, in terms of volume, in terms of mass – so outrageously hostile to life… while Earth, this tiny island afloat in the void, is extremely hospitable to life?

THE USUAL STERILE DEBATE ABOUT LIFE

The usual debate about what life in the universe tells us about the universe is totally sterile. Some people point at the vast expanse of void dotted with occasional black holes and nuclear infernos (ignoring Earth as an irrelevant, rare, random, and probably accidental rounding error), and say, “See? The universe is utterly indifferent to life!”  Others point at the profound richness of life on Earth (ignoring the vast surrounding expanse of void dotted with occasional black holes and nuclear infernos) and say “See? The universe is built for life!”

But both are true. What is more interesting is to explore, why both?

Look at it again: Life is simultaneously marginal in this universe (99.99999999999999% of it cannot support life), and yet in that remaining 0.00000000000001% it is highly supported. Odd combination.

And, pondering this, inspired by Will’s tweet, I came up with an actual explanation.

So I wrote a long answer to Will (it took me several days, and several drafts – I was working out my ideas as I wrote), and posted it on Twitter, sorry, X, in reply to his tweet.

Of course, he probably didn’t read it. I do not blame him: the obvious reaction, on Elon Musk’s brave new X, to someone posting several thousand words in reply to a casual tweet from a week earlier is to assume they are a lunatic, because 99.999% of the time, that will be true.

But I think I actually answered his implicit question – and if I DID, then I have explained the structure of the universe. And even given a mechanism for delivering it. Which is a hell of a thing, if true. And it seems a shame to just leave that as a neglected week-late answer to an obscure tweet, buried unread in the inbox of a grumpy old man.

Now, I do intend to convert this mega-tweet into a chapter in the book… but that could take a loooong time. One problem with this tweet is that I was writing it directly to an excellent physicist and cosmologist, so I didn’t really need to explain technical terms, and could assume a huge amount of background knowledge. For the book version – for a general readership – I will have to rework the mega-tweet heavily, and give a lot of background.

 However, I am eager to put the idea in front of you now, while it is fresh.

GIVE ME FEEDBACK OR GIVE ME DEATH

And I am PARTICULARLY eager to get feedback on it now, right at the start, so that I can improve the eventual chapter.

So I’m pasting the original tweet in below, raw, even though it’s going to be dense and often impenetrable to anyone with no physics background. (I did briefly explain a few concepts, and answer a couple of obvious questions, because I was aware that, as an open reply on Twitter/X, people other than Will might read it, and I wanted to help them follow it; but in general it’s dense, and everything is under-explained.)

However, I would greatly appreciate you reading it anyway, if you can! That would help me hugely in writing the chapter. Tell me what you need explained. Tell me where the logic isn’t clear. Tell me where you think I’m wrong. (And also, on the positive side, please do tell me which points, or analogies, or lines, stand out, or are particularly clear or useful or exciting, or make you go “Ah!” That helps a lot, too. ) And of course, if you DO have a physics background (or an evolutionary biology background), your critique, both negative and positive, would be even more useful. In fact, if you have a friend who is a physicist/astrophysicist/cosmologist/evolutionary biologist (or a student in one of those fields) – I would love you to pass this on to them, and ask them to give feedback. Basically, all feedback, whether on style or content, whether from a position of knowledge or ignorance, is helpful and welcome.

(If this experiment works, I may post other early drafts to similarly solicit feedback; I’ve therefore titled this First Draft #1, to help people find, or avoid, such posts, according to taste.)

So, here’s Will’s tweet again, in case you’ve forgotten:

WILL KINNEY’S TWEET

“One of the reasons I don't believe in the Anthropic Principle is, that almost all of the universe is savagely deadly to warm little meatbags like us.”

And here is my epic reply, explaining the structure of the universe in evolutionary terms, cut ’n’ pasted directly from Twitter, sorry, X. (I’ve added some headings, to help you navigate it, and embedded some links, to give you quick access to background information.)

MY REPLY

Agreed. The anthropic principle is balls. The enjoyably provocative way you phrased it, though, got me pondering, and I think I’ve come up with an interesting hypothesis. (It took me a few days, thus the delayed reply.) Curb your natural desire to snort derisively and stop reading at the first line you disagree with, and read to the end; it comes together, I think. And then – but obviously only if you have time, and believe the argument is worth engaging with – give me a couple of lines of feedback. I’d be interested in your critique. (I’m writing a book on this, so feedback from subject experts is extremely valuable.)

OK. There are two important, entwined questions about our universe that can be extracted from your comment. One is, why is 99.999999999999% of it so incredibly hostile to life? (Or maybe better to say, absolutely and ferociously indifferent to life.) And the other question is, why is 0.0000000000001% of our universe so incredibly hospitable to life? A vast, inhospitable universe that is mostly hydrogen and helium plasma in a vacuum, yet which contains small, hyper-complex sub-regions which use all of the dozens of naturally stable elements to build rich solid/liquid/gas environments hospitable to “warm meatbags” is a deeply peculiar structure.

An evolved universe theory (one that expands and improves on Smolin’s old idea of cosmological natural selection) not only gives you an answer to both of these questions, it also shows you that such a peculiar-looking structure is the most likely result of an evolutionary process. (Stop rolling your eyes and hang in there, Will. We are going somewhere interesting.)

Essentially, you can see the evolutionary history of universes in that structure. An evolved universe – as the generations pass, and (along our successful evolutionary line) each new universe grows, on average, more complex and reproductively successful – nonetheless has to conserve many of the attributes that made its primitive ancestors successful. It has to build on that; it can’t just throw it away. (Just as mammals today, though wandering around on dry land, are still essentially membranes full of salty water – and indeed start their development inside a bag of salty water, inside their mother – because the earliest life evolved in the sea.)

WHAT DID A PRIMITIVE, EARLY UNIVERSE LOOK LIKE?

So, what did a primitive early universe in our direct evolutionary line look like? The one thing we know about it is that it reproduced successfully. And it probably didn’t do much else. (The DNA analogy is with early prokaryotic bacteria.) So the earliest universes were essentially simple black hole/big bang/black hole/big bang sequences, with some universes producing more black holes, and thus more big bangs, and thus more offspring, than others.

That is, with primitive universes, after the Big Bang that gave birth to them you pretty much immediately got a small number of direct collapse ultramassive black holes, or (in the more reproductively successful universes) many direct collapse supermassive black holes.

Bear in mind, given that evolution at the level of universes occurs through slight variations in the basic parameters of matter (and that this is an era long before the evolution of our current highly advanced fine-tuning of those basic parameters), matter itself is pretty primitive at this stage; we don’t have the hyper-evolved, ultra-complex, extremely stable, homeostatic, dynamic, out-of-equilibrium contemporary proton, for instance. But such complexity isn’t required yet; all that such ur-matter needs to do is expand, break up into more than one piece due to that expansion, and collapse.

(A note for any non-physicists reading this over Will’s shoulder: that means each of these primitive supermassive or ultramassive black holes, with a mass equivalent to hundreds of thousands, or millions, or even billions of suns, formed directly from the collapse of a single smooth cloud of gas, without the cloud breaking up into denser subregions and forming stars as it collapsed. In our specific universe today, there’s a supermassive black hole at the centre of pretty much every galaxy, but most black holes are much smaller, and are formed, in a more complex process, by the collapse of a star once it has burned all its fuel. Those smaller, stellar mass black holes – there are countless millions per galaxy – massively outnumber the supermassive black holes – of which there’s roughly one per galaxy.)

So, direct collapse ultramassive or supermassive black holes are conserved from the earliest, most primitive universes. They are fundamental to all universes in our evolutionary line. And those universes would have randomly explored that evolutionary possibility space for many, many, many generations, with primitive universes that produced greater and greater numbers of direct collapse supermassive black holes coming to dominate the total number of existing universes. (Another note for any non-physicists reading this over Will’s shoulder: Given that mass energy and gravitational energy net out to zero in our universe – as do positive and negative electrical charge, etc – there is no practical limit to the number of offspring universes this evolutionary line can have. You can make a universe from essentially nothing. Child universes don’t get smaller and smaller.)

WHAT IS THE NEXT MAJOR EVOLUTIONARY BREAKTHROUGH, ALONG OUR UNIVERSE’S EVOLUTIONARY LINE?

The next major evolutionary transition for universes in our evolutionary line comes when, eventually, in some universe, a random slight variation in the basic parameters of matter leads to each of those supermassive black holes having some leftover, ragged, fragmented, uncollapsed material orbiting them. When these smaller fragments do start to collapse, they’re not massive enough to just keep on collapsing to form direct collapse black holes, but instead get stuck halfway, and form large numbers of proto-stars. (Note for non-physicists: as the collapsing nuclei are driven closer and closer together under the influence of gravity, they begin to fuse, releasing energy as radiation, until that radiation is enough to balance and thus pause the gravitational collapse – so you get a stable star.) Those proto-stars eventually run out of fuel and collapse further to make large numbers of stellar mass black holes.

This is a huge breakthrough in reproductive success; it’s a mutation that soon comes to dominate the overall number of universes, as it produces far more offspring than a purely direct-collapse-supermassive-black-hole universe. The hugely increased number of offspring can then explore the possibility space for the particular fine-tuning of the basic parameters of matter that has generated them. That process is refined further by evolution over time until supermassive black holes actively generate highly efficient star-producing galaxies, optimising the translation of matter into black holes.

Incidentally, I predicted this model before the James Webb Space Telescope released its first data, and everything it has seen since backs my model: the remarkably (but not perfectly) smooth early universe, immediately post Big Bang, is optimised by evolution for direct collapse supermassive black hole production (not star production), and it’s the supermassive black holes which then optimise conditions in our universe for rapid star production. (By attracting, enriching, and shocking the remaining gas, while removing its angular momentum, by way of the accretion disc and jets.) So the mass-balance between supermassive black holes and stars in early galaxies should be tilted heavily towards supermassive black holes. Which is exactly what we are seeing. And galaxy formation should be rapid, efficient, and early. (Not slow and bottom-up.) Which is exactly what we are seeing.

Anyway, that’s the largely hostile-to-life, hydrogen-and-helium-in-a-vacuum universe. That’s where it came from, in evolutionary terms. It’s incredibly hot-and-high-pressure (stars) or incredibly cold-and-low-pressure (space); and that’s it. It’s not deliberately hostile to life; there is no life yet to be hostile to. It’s simply indifferent to life’s potential future needs. But it is tremendously reproductively successful: it generates a lot of black holes, and thus big bangs and thus child universes. And it has infinite time, and as many generations as it wants (with a lot of offspring in each generation), to explore the possibility space for those basic parameters of matter. (If it’s exploring that possibility space in a random walk, then many of its offspring will of course be LESS evolutionarily successful, or not successful at all; that’s fine, we are not descended from those dead ends. I’m just concerned with exploring our direct evolutionary line, the one that leads to this universe.)

WHY DO UNIVERSES ALONG THIS EVOLUTIONARY LINE EVENTUALLY GENERATE LIFE?

Now I’m going to explain why such a universe ultimately generates life of the kind we see on earth – and in particular, how generating things like human beings can be a reproductively successful strategy at the level of universes. This is where I’m going to lose a lot of people, probably including you, Will, because it will feel speculative, science fictional. Fine, I get your reluctance, but hang in there to the end, the argument is much, much stronger than it looks at first glance. (Even Smolin hates this step, bless him, but he is wrong; he hasn’t fully thought it through, because he doesn’t know enough about evolution.)

OK, eventually, at some point, a typical somewhat-evolved universe, comprising a few direct collapse supermassive black holes plus many more stellar mass black holes, makes the next revolutionary breakthrough, or step change; it generates matter that can copy itself – maintaining and iterating an orderly structure over time – and that can manipulate other matter. Let’s call it life, to separate it out a little and allow us to discuss it, although it’s still just increasingly fine-tuned matter obeying increasingly fine-tuned physical laws. (No humans or human-like things yet in these early life-exploring universes.) Matter that can manipulate matter, and that can copy itself – life – grows more complex, generation of universe by generation of universe, as those universes generate more elements – as they blindly explore the possibility space opened up by stars, and thus fusion, and thus stellar nucleosynthesis. Note that so far this life-matter isn’t a new breakthrough, this is just the slow arbitrary complexification that comes with any evolutionary mechanism. (An example from DNA evolution: the plumage of the birdlife in Borneo complexifies over time, even in the absence of new threats or environmental changes.)

((Later note from me, not in tweet: this is a bad example, as sexual selection, rather than natural selection, drives such plumage change, and there is no equivalent to sexual selection for universes. I should have thought a bit deeper, and come up with a purer example of random genetic drift, where sexual selection wasn’t a factor. Anyway, as you can see, I have managed to grit my teeth, restrain my perfectionist urge, and put up this draft faults and all. And yes, I’ll fix this in the finished chapter. End of note.))

But at some point – remember, this has been happening forever, we have infinite time, an infinite number of generations of universe are possible – the matter that manipulates matter – life – gets complicated enough to control its source of energy. And once it can control that, it will control that, because life inside a universe needs to take energy from that universe in order to maintain its out-of-equilibrium orderly structure. Another way to think of this is that a universe is both organism and environment – energy-user and energy-source – which is why so much of our own specific universe ends up devoted to efficient long-term energy production (through very slow, stable fusion processes in stars).

CHASING ENERGY UP THE EFFICIENCY SLOPE

And so life chases energy up the efficiency slope, starting with chemical processes (converting pretty close to 0.0% of the fuel’s mass to energy). Our own sequence has been: our muscles, then animals’ muscles, then wood, wind, coal, oil, gas, solar… As life grows more complex – or put another way, as matter gets better at manipulating matter, by manipulating matter into forms that could not be generated by nature, but which can manipulate matter better than natural forms of matter can, at both larger and smaller scales, ie technology – it unlocks more efficient processes. Fission (converting 0.1% mass to energy) is way more efficient than chemistry; fusion (0.7%) is even more efficient than fission; but black holes (up to 42%) convert more mass into energy than anything else, even fusion. So the logic of life is that it will try to make very small black holes; they are the most efficient energy source, in our evolutionary line of universes, and so any self-replicating lifeforms that require energy to survive will converge on that solution.

Can life make small artificial black holes? Sure, given enough time. As David Deutsch has pointed out, anything that isn’t ruled out by physical laws is possible. And technological evolution, partly because it is directed by conscious agents, vastly outstrips DNA evolution in speed (which, in turn, vastly outstrips the speed of evolution at the level of universes). Technology is just matter manipulating matter to manipulate matter even more efficiently. And once that process starts, progress is exponential. As we can see from our own recent history, life gets really good at the second-order manipulation of matter by matter – technology – really fast.

((Later note, not in tweet: The mathematician Louis Crane has written a couple of papers on the optimum size for artificially-made energy-producing black holes, and possible methods for making them. I should have mentioned those papers here – Will would probably have liked a link to an actual peer-reviewed paper exploring this, rather than my handwaving – but hey, it’s a flawed first draft.))

And once lifeforms inside universes, as subunits of those universes, are able to generate, through technological means, small, efficient, black holes for energy production, then you’ve had a third major evolutionarily breakthrough, into reproductive hyper-success. Descendants of such a universe will vastly outnumber the descendants of simpler few-supermassive-black-hole/many-stellar-mass-black-hole-producing universes. And so, the evolutionary possibility space of this new kind of universe, which produces not just supermassive black holes and stellar mass black holes, but also vast numbers of much smaller, artificially produced black holes (with life, and its needs, as the mechanism of production), will be explored very, very thoroughly. Our universe is part of that phase of evolutionary exploration.

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ANTIMATTER? AN ASIDE, GIVING AN EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATION FOR THE LACK OF SIGNIFICANT QUANTITIES OF ANTIMATTER IN OUR UNIVERSE

Interesting side note: Matter/antimatter annihilation (100% conversion of mass to energy) would be even more efficient than small black hole production; but no evolutionary advantage would accrue to a universe in which life skipped past small black hole production to matter/antimatter annihilation. So any universe containing a great deal of matter AND antimatter should be far less reproductively successful than one containing only one or the other. (Likewise for universes where antimatter was easy to produce.) And sure enough, our universe does not leave any significant quantities of free antimatter floating around. (Sure, you can make some antimatter, but making antimatter, in the real world – thanks to fundamental, and thus unavoidable, practical problems like bremsstrahlung radiation and the exclusion principle and blah blah blah – always takes more energy than you could ever get back.) In other words, the extreme matter/antimatter imbalance in our universe is something that mainstream cosmology has a lot of trouble explaining – but it would be an obvious direct consequence of this model of cosmological evolution…

Anyway, after many, many generations, with evolution blindly fine-tuning the basic parameters of matter in each generation, the reproductively dominant universes will briskly and efficiently use their supermassive black holes to produce galaxies of stars (and thus, ultimately, stellar mass black holes): will briskly and efficiently produce planets suitable for life around those stars; and will briskly and efficiently produce the conditions for life on those planets.

AN EVOLVED CHEMICAL LOGIC QUICKLY PLAYS OUT

There is an evolved chemical logic which plays out here at this point, complexifying the geosphere from, say, the initial dozen or so minerals found in the cloud of gas and dust from which our earth formed, to a couple of thousand minerals by the time life started, to the five-and-a-half thousand minerals Earth has now, as a fully-fledged, self-regulating biosphere. (See Robert Hazen et al, Mineral Evolution. Or Hazen’s new paper, led by Michael L. Wong, out this week in PNAS: On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.)

Once the geosphere has complexified to the point that a biosphere can now commence (a purely chemical process, which has by now been refined by evolution, at the level of universes, to be quite brisk in any specific universe along this evolutionary line, such as ours), life then has to self-assemble upward into complexity on these planets, which, unavoidably, takes quite a while – complex multicellular organisms can’t just simply come into being on any given planet inside any given individual universe; they have to be ratcheted up into that complexity over billions of replication cycles under intense evolutionary pressure, customising life to the conditions on that particular planet. But once sufficiently complex life has self-assembled, it will briskly and efficiently produce large numbers of small, artificial black holes. And all of this will play out directly from the extreme, evolved, fine-tuning of the basic parameters of matter.

By the way, when I say “efficiently”, right up until that last (technological) step I mean the kind of efficiency you get from a blind evolutionary process, not a directed technological process. As my biologist friends point out to me, evolution isn’t particularly efficient – it’s gloriously wasteful and sloppy – but it nonetheless gets the job done. So the evolved efficiency of our universe resembles the evolved efficiency of, say, an oak tree, producing several million grains of pollen and tens of thousands of acorns per year. Less efficient than the dream of perfect efficiency a technocrat could imagine; infinitely more efficient than randomness.

HURRAY FOR THE WARM MEATBAGS, UNEXPECTED HEROES OF COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION!

As you can see, a vast inhospitable universe of hot plasma and cold void (dominated by supermassive black holes, each of which is surrounded by a huge number of far less massive stars which generate huge quantities of stellar mass black holes), which nonetheless, briskly and efficiently, generates extremely small, well-protected temperate zones for hyper-complex life (capable of, at some point, generating incalculable numbers of tiny, energy-efficient, black holes), is a logical outcome, under an evolved universe hypothesis. The warm meatbags, funnily enough, are the most reproductively successful part of the universe. So they are extremely strongly selected for; you should find them, or at least matter-manipulating-matter that functionally resembles them (the meatbags may be a transitional stage to something that would look, to our eyes, more technological), all over this universe; you should find them all over many, many, many, many, many other universes.

But the plasma and the inhospitable void are conserved, because you can’t get to the warm meatbags without them. And likewise the meatbags are conserved (even though a warm meatbag may well be inferior, from the universe’s point of view, to a far more skilful technological/AI entity that can more efficiently bang out small black holes) because you can’t get to the technological/AI entities without generating the meatbags first.

Note the complexification of everything, at every level, here. In earlier, more primitive universes, primitive proto-matter would’ve just directly collapsed. Now it’s highly evolved hydrogen doing the job, but it doesn’t need to be. That is, deep in the evolutionary past of universes, direct collapse supermassive black holes would not have even needed elements. Big Bangs, black holes, Big Bangs, black holes; each new generation was just the expansion and collapse of a primitive protomatter.

UNIVERSES EVOLVED. WHICH MEANS MATTER EVOLVED. WHICH MEANS EVOLUTION EVOLVED.

But – given that the basic parameters of matter can vary slightly in each generation – matter itself has evolved. And, nested within that, generated by that matter and the increasingly complex evolved chemistry of increasingly complex evolved fermions and bosons, DNA evolution has evolved.

Evolution evolved. This, incidentally, answers another of your questions (I think you asked this last year):

“The fact that the age of the Earth and the age of the universe are even remotely similar numbers is honestly pretty weird. Why isn't the universe a trillion times older than the solar system?”

(Yeah, I just went and checked; you tweeted that on Dec 17th 2022.)

If there were just one universe, and if that universe were made of matter with arbitrary characteristics just moving around blindly at random, sure, it would be weird. But by this point in the evolutionary history of universes, an evolved universe is going to build out worlds, and life, rapidly and efficiently. The fact that the age of the universe and the age of the Earth are so close is extremely strong evidence for the theory. And of course your intuition is valid; our universe must have descended from earlier, less efficient universes, where it DID take far, far longer to build out habitable worlds, and life. But the looooong evolutionary process that sped up and optimised that developmental process, all happened at the level of universes, across many generations of our ancestral universes. Not inside the lifetime of this one.

Right now, in this particular universe of ours, countless generations later, elements are complex structures of protons, neutrons and electrons – with the protons and neutrons themselves, in turn, extraordinarily complex, having by now been fine-tuned by evolution to generate this complex, reproductively successful universe.

LIFE AT A LOCAL FITNESS PEAK

In evolutionary terms, we are, by now, at an extreme local fitness peak. (Which is expressed as extreme fine tuning, by a blind evolutionary process, of the basic parameters of matter.) Tweak any of those basic parameters by much, and you don’t even get solid matter, let alone galaxies, let alone life, let alone humans building space telescopes. Put another way, it would be hard, at this point, to jump to a very different (but equally reproductively successful) form of universe from here. We’re like a giraffe, or a humming bird. (Or an amoeba: who knows how complex universes can get, and have got? We are just at the end of one evolutionary line. There are, no doubt, many others.)

And if you look at the basic parameters of matter in our universe, they are of exactly the kind you would expect after a long evolutionary process has fine-tuned them. That is, they are all over the fucking place. What has been fine-tuned is, essentially, their relationships to each other, which have been adjusted, and adjusted, and adjusted by countless generations of evolution, to generate this kind of ultra-complex universe: the kind with things like us in it. The fine structure constant, the mass of the electron, the precise parameters of the strong nuclear force… their values are what they need to be in order to produce this reproductively successful universe.

This leads to lots of weird-looking fine-tuned relationships between parameters that generate highly unlikely-looking consequences, that happen to be extremely functional in terms of that reproductive success. Note how, say, the strong nuclear force becomes repulsive at a certain density of matter; thus, large collapsing stars can, while also making a black hole (early form of reproductive success! Conserved!), go supernova, and thus distribute the heavy elements required for planetary formation back out into the interstellar medium where they are needed (for later-evolved, more efficient forms of reproductive success!) – even though those elements were manufactured at the bottom of an incredibly deep gravity well.

Superficially, that resembles the anthropic principle; actually, it’s completely different. An evolved universe theory doesn’t postulate an infinite number of random universes; it postulates a large but finite number of universes, and gives you an explanation, and a mechanism, for generating each one, from an absolutely primal original simplicity.

Bonus feature: no arbitrary creation-out-of-nothing is required: there was always something, and it was probably incredibly, ridiculously simple for a ludicrously long time. We have, however, clearly now hit the hockey-stick inflection point on the complexification graph… But, as the NUMBER of universes shoots up, along with the complexification, then there is no Baysian unlikelihood problem. Most universes, at this point, are likely to be complex, because the most complex ones are the most reproductively successful ones. And so we human beings are in an extremely common kind of universe, not an astonishingly rare one. (A VAST improvement on the anthropic principle.)

THERE IS NO HIDDEN SYMMETRY

This has another consequence: everybody looking for a simple underlying law, or for any kind of mathematical elegance underlying the weird, arbitrary-seeming numbers that comprise the basic parameters of matter in our particular universe – through supersymmetry, and so on – is doomed to brutal disappointment. There is no hidden symmetry. No hidden mathematical elegance. The elegance is in the universe itself. Not in the pragmatic, messy, evolved parameters that generate it.

(One of, er two. Wow, I broke X.)

((Later note, written after the tweet: Yeah, at this point I had managed to max out X’s new epic tweet length. Oy. So, this is the end of the first tweet and the beginning of the, much shorter, second; I’ve left the original notes I wrote at the break-point, above and below, for flavour.))

Where were we? Oh yes. Second of two. (Don't worry, we're nearly done.)

A JAGUAR IS ELEGANT

Similarly, a jaguar is elegant; its DNA (packed with the necessary fudges and compromises of a long evolutionary history) is not.

Such fudges and compromises are inevitably present in the basic parameters of matter, because, as universes grow more complex over the generations, earlier aspects nonetheless have to be conserved. You can see this play out in the developmental unfolding of our universe after the Big Bang: the interactions between the basic parameters of matter generate unlikely yet functional glitches, that would be very hard to explain in a one-shot universe, but which make perfect sense in an evolved one.

The flipping of the strong nuclear force during stellar collapse is one; another nice example is the deuterium bottleneck. If the basic parameters of matter in our universe allowed stable isotopes with an atomic mass of 5 or 8, then everything would fuse at the temperatures and pressures found straight after the Big Bang, and you wouldn’t get the nicely balanced initial hydrogen-and-helium mix that allows for the step-by-step developmental unfolding of stars and planets and life – and thus this complex, highly reproductively successful universe.

DON’T MUTATE THAT MUTATION!

So, it’s very UNLIKELY, in a random one-shot universe, that you would get two islands of instability, at 5 and 8, and then none again until you get close to a hundred. But it is a very likely result, under an evolved universe theory, because it is a highly functional mutation which leads to extreme reproductive success. That is, if the basic parameters of matter simply vary slightly each time, and explore the possibility space randomly, that mutation, once it is hit upon, will be highly selected for: universes with that mutation will vastly outproduce universes without it. (But now they are constrained to preserve it; further mutations that lose that mutation will not reproductively prosper.)

How do you get, then, from a simple hydrogen and helium (and a bit of lithium) universe to one with many dozens of stable elements, and thus planets, and life? Well, step by step, mutation by mutation, breakthrough by breakthrough, through a random walk.

Carbon and oxygen would be a later evolutionary breakthrough that, at first, simply helped with more efficient star formation. You can make much smaller stars (and thus generate more stars from the same starting materials, and thus more stellar mass black holes, and thus more reproductive success) with some carbon and oxygen mixed into your hydrogen and helium. They act as coolants in the gas cloud, they help drive the triple alpha process in the core, and so on. (One of these things probably came before the other, but by now, tweaked by evolution, they do both really well.)

Complex biospheres of the sort we inhabit need a far more complex collection of elements; but you can see – just looking around our own universe – how the carbon and oxygen that helped make stars more efficient – and thus stellar mass black hole production more efficient – were conserved, and became the basis for organic chemistry and life.

This kind of repurposing of an evolved mechanism to fit a new, more complex purpose is very common in DNA evolution, where it is known as exaptation (i.e. feathers developed as insulation for dinosaurs get re-purposed, in later generations, as feathers that help their descendants, birds, to fly). So, even though we have an N of one, and can’t see any of the earlier more primitive universes that lead to ours, we can nonetheless trace the evolutionarily history of our universe through the increasing complexification of the processes (and the very elements) which generate supermassive black holes, stellar mass black holes, and technologically-produced black holes.

Nice, huh? An evolutionary explanation for the deeply peculiar structure of our universe.

Your thoughts?

((Aaaaaand…  that’s the end of the original mega-tweet. Thank you for reading this far, and please put your feedback below. Any thoughts at all, that might help me make this clearer to the general reader, are welcome! And also: what do you think?))

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This is HUGELY encouraging for the Evolved Universe hypothesis that I am exploring here – it means that my predictions of extremely rapid galaxy formation in the early universe have turned out to be correct. Several papers from earlier this year gave strong hints that this was the case, but they were looking at very small numbers of galaxies, so it was possible they had accidentally stumbled upon a handful of outliers, and it wouldn’t apply more generally.

However, this is a BIG survey, which makes the evidence far stronger; they’ve looked at almost four thousand extremely distant (and therefore early) galaxies – which is about twenty times more than any earlier, similar, survey.

They divided the galaxies into three categories

• Disk (Basically spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way.)

• Spheroid (Ball-shaped galaxies.)

• Peculiar (All the weird ones left over.)

And then they measured each galaxy’s redshift – how stretched out its light has become, on the long journey to us through an ever-expanding universe. (The more distant the source of the light, the more that light will have been stretched, and thus shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, by the time it arrives.)

That told them how old each galaxy was; how long after the Big Bang we were capturing its light.

Then they analysed the results, to see how many galaxies of each type (disk, spheroid, or peculiar) existed at each era; that is, to see how the shapes of galaxies come about, and how they change over time.

The old assumption was that highly structured spiral galaxies came about slowly and late, through bottom-up structure formation. Bottom-up structure formation essentially means order arising very, very slowly from a lot of randomness, as early solitary stars clump (under the influence of gravity) to form star clusters, which clump to form dwarf galaxies, which merge to form small, irregularly-shaped galaxies, which merge to form larger also peculiarly-shaped galaxies, some of which eventually settle down and find a spiral structure. But the assumption was that you simply couldn’t get large numbers of spiral galaxies in the first few billion years of the universe’s existence, as, even if they had somehow managed to form, they would be disrupted by all that clumping and merging.

This model had come under strain in the Hubble Space Telescope years, as we looked back further and further into the past, closer and closer to the Big Bang, and still saw large spiral galaxies, and thus began to run out of time for all this slow, random, accretion. But a LOT of early galaxies still looked pretty irregular or peculiar to the Hubble (though the resolution of those images was poor, so it was hard to tell); and so the model just about survived.

Not any more.

Here’s the key finding, from the paper (with a breakdown of what it all means underneath):

“…galaxies with M* > 10^ 9 M⊙ at z > 3 are not dominated by irregular and peculiar structures, either visually or quantitatively, as previously thought. We find a strong dominance of morphologically selected disk galaxies up to z = 6 in this mass range. We also find that the stellar mass and star formation rate densities are dominated by disk galaxies up to z ∼ 6, demonstrating that most stars in the Universe were likely formed in a disk galaxy.”

–from the paper, The JWST Hubble Sequence: The Rest-frame Optical Evolution of Galaxy Structure at 1.5 < z < 6.5, by Leonardo Ferreira, Christopher J. Conselice, Elizaveta Sazonova, et al, published in the Astrophysical Journal, September 22^nd 2023. (Official citation, in case that’s useful for you: Leonardo Ferreira et al 2023 ApJ 955 94)

That’s devastating for the old model. And FANTASTIC news for the model of rapid, early, galaxy formation, driven by direct-collapse supermassive black holes, that I’ve outlined on this Substack.

Let me break it down:

“…galaxies with M* > 10^ 9 M⊙ at z > 3 are not dominated by irregular and peculiar structures, either visually or quantitatively, as previously thought.”

M⊙ stands for the mass of our sun, which we use as a handy measuring unit for the mass of galaxies. M* is the stellar mass of an entire galaxy: the mass of all the stars (so, not the gas, not the dark matter; just the stars). And z is the redshift: the greater the redshift, the greater the distance away from us in space and time – and thus the closer to the Big Bang, and the birth of the universe.

A z of 3 – a redshift of three – is, roughly, a couple of billion years after the Big Bang. So that line means that the large galaxies that they observed a couple of billion years after the Big Bang (that’s galaxies larger than 10-to-the-9 solar masses, so a billion times more massive than our sun), are not mostly irregular or peculiar in shape, as had been assumed.

Essentially, the powerful new measuring instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched last year, are able to get a much clearer picture of these galaxies, which looked irregular or peculiar to the Hubble Space Telescope; in fact, they turn out to be, in a huge number of cases, spiral galaxies with well defined structures. Many of them have clearly visible spiral arms; some have bars.

How come the Hubble got this so wrong? Several reasons: one is simply that the Hubble didn’t have the resolution to pick up on these details. Remember, the day it launched, on April 24^th 1990, Sinéad O'Connor was at number one with "Nothing Compares 2 U”; the Hubble Space Telescope is now 33 years old. Yes, NASA have updated a lot of the original equipment since (the Hubble is the only space telescope designed to be serviced by astronauts); but the huge Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) they used to image these galaxies was installed in 2009, by astronauts using the Space Shuttle. (Back when Boom Boom Pow by The Black Eyed Peas was at number one.) Imagine how much digital camera technology has improved since 2009: the Hubble images are REALLY small and smudgy and hard to interpret.

Have a look for yourself: Here are thirteen galaxies, stacked. In each row, on the left, you can see four images (taken at four different wavelengths) by the Hubble Space Telescope. On the right, you can see six images of the same galaxy taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

A second reason Hubble didn’t see spirals is that the Hubble is largely a visible-light telescope, and so the wavelengths which the Hubble was designed to detect were the wrong ones for picking out such structure at that distance. Remember, light coming from that distance has been heavily redshifted; a lot of the visible light has moved well into the infrared. Hubble’s WFC3 can see a little bit into the infrared, but not far: it is deliberately designed to lack sensitivity beyond 1700 nanometers, because the heat of the Hubble itself would completely drown out the images otherwise. (Heat is infrared light, and so the Hubble, unfortunately, glows with warmth in exactly the range these galaxies also now glow in, drowning out their dim light. The James Webb Space Telescope, by contrast, is cooled to near absolute zero, and so can see far further into the infrared range.)

And so Hubble, it turned out, was often only able to see the (brighter, bluer, more energetic) light from the hot, star-forming regions of these extremely distant galaxies: those regions were irregular or peculiar in shape, but the galaxy as a whole was, in fact, a spiral. And the James Webb Space Telescope’s instruments are able to detect the galaxy as a whole – not just the hot star-forming regions – because it’s an infrared telescope, it’s specifically designed for this kind of task, and so its instruments are picking up those longer, cool, redder wavelengths of light which the Hubble missed, and which are given off by the older, cooler stars in the rest of the galaxy.

But a third reason is that the astronomers and cosmologists analysing the original Hubble data had a strong bias towards finding randomness, blobbiness, lack of structure; it was what their theory predicted. And so they looked at photos of spiral galaxies taken by Hubble, and interpreted them, not as showing the star-making regions of spiral galaxies, but as showing peculiar, odd-shaped, random blobby galaxies. This is yet another example of the phenomenon I described in my earlier post, In cosmology, all our errors lean the same way…

“Our universe always turns out to be bigger, more structured, more complex, and more weirdly efficient, than we've anticipated…
(…)
…above all, until they start using egg physics rather than rock physics, they {astronomers} will be blindsided particularly badly in the early universe; particularly in the first billion years – the last refuge of randomness – where they thought they would, finally, find random matter blindly obeying arbitrary laws – and where instead, again and again (as I predicted), they are finding the structure, and order, of an evolved organism efficiently and rapidly proceeding along a clear developmental path.”
-Me, being annoyingly right, again, back in May.

OK, back to the paper. What’s next?

“We find a strong dominance of morphologically selected disk galaxies up to z = 6 in this mass range.”

That means that disk galaxies – galaxies like our own Milky Way – dominate from redshift 3 to redshift 6. Which means from a couple of billion years after the Big Bang back to a billion years after the Big Bang. (Why stop at a billion? Because it’s still REALLY hard to see any detail in anything much further back than that, even for the James Webb.) MOST big galaxies that the Hubble had classified as irregular or peculiar were misclassified.  And have now been reclassified. And this has implications for all the galaxies of that era.

So, a huge number of galaxies that LAST WEEK were officially classified as irregular or peculiar in shape are now officially well-structured spiral galaxies. OUR ENTIRE PICTURE OF THE EARLY UNIVERSE just changed, overnight.

What’s next?

“We also find that the stellar mass and star formation rate densities are dominated by disk galaxies up to z ∼ 6, demonstrating that most stars in the Universe were likely formed in a disk galaxy.”

Well, that’s pretty self-explanatory. Most of the stars up to redshift 6 (a billion years after the Big Bang), are found in spiral galaxies, and most of the star formation up to redshift 6  is also happening in spiral galaxies: so, most stars in our universe were formed in (large, structured) spiral galaxies. That is, it’s not bottom-up structure formation, with a long early period of small, random, blobby little clumps slowly forming galaxies, at all. Structures start early, and drive star formation. Which is what I predicted before the James Webb Space Telescope released its first data.

Of course, it is still perfectly possible that the specific, detailed formation mechanism I suggested in that post last year may yet turn out to be wrong, in whole or in part. It’s an ambitious, speculative leap. (Though, feck it, I’m actually even more confident after this paper.) But, after this stunning revision of the Hubble data, I’m clearly right about the big picture prediction: spiral galaxy formation is early, rapid, and efficient, far more so than the mainstream had anticipated. Just listen to Christopher Conselice, the lead author on this new paper:

“Using the Hubble Space Telescope we thought that disk galaxies were almost non-existent until the Universe was about six billion years old; these new JWST results push the time these Milky Way-like galaxies form to almost the beginning of the Universe. (…) Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years.”
–Christopher Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester

Wow wow wow wow wow wow.

And remember, I predicted this in the teeth of the Hubble data. An evolved universe simply couldn’t have the kind of slow, chaotic, bottom-up structure formation that the Hubble was hinting at. A long period of early randomness just wouldn’t make sense: evolution should have tightened up the process of early structure formation by now. The transition from a cloud of gas to star-forming galaxies should be brisk and efficient.

And now we know… it is.

I don’t want bonus points for me, or my ego (my ego is doing fine); I want those bonus points for the theory. (I’m just riding on its back, teasing out its implications.) An evolved universe theory has now made big, solid predictions about the early universe that have proved correct. Not only that, but the evolved universe theory made those predictions in the teeth of existing data from the Hubble that pointed the other way; data which has now been completely reinterpreted, in precisely the way that the theory predicted it would be. Big, big win for the Evolved Universe model…

POSTSCRIPT ABOUT INTERESTING PAPERS

OK, what I found myself doing in the past, when a fascinating new paper like this dropped, was attempting to write a full, epic post about it, giving all the background, summarising the whole paper, teasing out all the implications, etc. But the amount of work involved (I often had to do a lot of fresh research, or even try to master a new sub-speciality) meant that those posts never got posted, because they took WEEEEEEKS, and something new always came up to bump them down my priority list before I could finish them.

So – though I do have much, much, much more to say on this subject – this is a short, punchy post, simply drawing your attention to the paper and its main findings (so you can go explore it yourself, if you like). I plan to experiment with more such short posts, when important, interesting, or otherwise intriguing new papers come out, which I will title, and tag, as “Interesting New Paper”.

Hot damn, though! What a win! Please do share this, or the original paper, with anyone you think might be interested. SERIOUSLY, SHARE IT! DON’T JUST SIT ON YOUR ARSE AND CHECK YOUR INSTAGRAM! GET INVOLVED! GET YOUR FRIENDS INVOLVED! SEND IT TO YOUR FAVOURITE SCIENCE-NERD FRIEND NOW, SO YOU HAVE SOMEONE TO TALK TO ABOUT THIS!

Isn’t this EXCITING? Isn’t this more interesting than ANYTHING ELSE? It looks like we might be right; the universe isn’t random, arbitrary, mere dead matter decaying: instead, and without breaking any laws of physics, without any woo-woo, it is developing, unfolding, rapidly, efficiently, right from the start, like an evolved organism; it’s going somewhere, and we are part of it.

WOW…

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