Julian, I love your work and I found this essay endlessly fascinating. Before I say anything else, I must preface my commentary with the fact that I am not a physicist. Every corner of your essay you preceded with "Note for non-physicists", I smiled and waved. So from a physicists perspective, I may as well solely be a helpless meatbag to you. Perhaps like Will ignoring your long and delayed responses to his tweet (or to his X? what do we even call them now?), you too will ignore me and I will call you not an old grumpy man but a grumpy egghead. Jokes aside, I cannot provide commentary on your theory, so I hope I can provide feedback in the only other way I know possible and helpful. I pulled your content into a google doc and started going to work, giving feedback where I felt it would be helpful. I am through 5 of 16 pages so give me a few more hours or a few more days. My hope is that, should you decide to take snippets of this and turn it into a chapter in your book, that this feedback is any way shape or form, even in the slightest bit, helpful to you.
Since your theory suggests that our universe is tuned to give rise to sentient life with the capacity to manufacture black holes, it heightens the mystery of why we don't see more evidence for them through our telescopes. Hanson does some impressive math to show what this implies. He's a very rigorous thinker unafraid to come to unpopular conclusions - I think you'd like him if not already acquainted.
I agree with much of this and have stumbled here trying to find more posts on the finer details/thoughts that cosmological natural selection would lead to, seeing if anyone was writing along the lines of which I've been thinking.
Note: I know the subtitle of your article ends "so help me make it better", but I wouldn't want you to meaningfully take/present from the below as your own ideas. Not to be too up my own ass about my ideas, but they are meaningful to me.
Thoughts I've had along this area:
1. I do think the AP still has A LOT to do with the branch of universes we can find ourselves in. It's a prerequisite for this discussion that we are considering universes which eventually develop consciousness. If time can be thought of as real, then primordial blackholes generated in .0000...x% of the time of a galactic blackhole should far and away out-procreate universes with other types of blackholes which take astronomically (no pun intended) longer to form. If primordial black holes formed in 1 second and initial galactic black holes formed in ~500 million years, we're talking about 10^16 generations of primordial black hole universes before the first universe forms other black holes. One would theorize that the local maximum for black holes/child universes from primordial black holes would be extremely hard to outcompete / is probably the global TIME-ADJUSTED maximum. I can't find guestimates of the number of primordial black holes that could have been created, but given this natural selection / local maximum logic you'd think it wouldn't be wildly off in terms of black hole orders of magnitude we find from stellar/galactic black holes in our universe (this is pure conjecture, but if 10^16 generations of primordial-driven universes can occur for a single generation of galactic/stellar black hole universes, then I'm not sure anything but an insane order of magnitude jump would be enough for our type of universe to outnumber/outdenominator purely primordial driven ones.)
2. This might be an argument for dark matter as primordial black holes, especially if black hole universe generation is scale invariant (which it would seem to logically be, else finite resources/energy/matter runs out), and dark matter could be the 2nd/3rd evolution as you lay it out. If dark matter is primordial black holes, and each is enough to create a child universe, then it would stand to reason we'd have a universe as full as possible of tiny black holes. This might be a) an earlier leap than galactic blackholes (so 2nd perturbation or however you frame it), 2) also factor in to dark matter as a necessary condition for conciousness/AP, 3) be even more interesting if dark matter wasn't a meaningful/necessary factor for conciousness/AP (since that would be real evidence that there is primarily a weight towards more universe procreation and secondly a need for consciousness in order for us to be having this conversation). This could also be something of a testable hypothesis in terms of cosmological natural selection, at least in the affirmative (i.e. if dark matter does turn out to be primordial black holes, then the universe really does appear to be geared towards creating as many as possible). In the negative, I'm not sure it really disproves cosmological natural selection since it could be that dark matter was not an avenue for black hole creation, and dark matter itself might be necessary for optimal galactic black hole formation.
3. I'd argue that simulations are the next leap forward in fecundity as it relates to the AP. Universes which create intelligence to create universes add another factor here. Not sure how the cardinality stacks up against primordial, supermassive, or "common" black holes, and maybe it's not an order of magnitude difference, but even a small multiplier growing at the same exponential rate would dwarf the non-multiplier (non simulation generating) universes at some point. The time factors function differently here as we think of AP, since we are thinking of the time until we get to a level of consciousness approaching our own (for the sake of argument, 14B years) vs the time until we get to a level of intelligence able to create simulated universes (maybe 14.0001B years). So no longer are we comparing 1 second primordials to 500B galactic black hole universes, and we are able to pretty much negate the time factors here (it might make more sense to talk about the odds of the 2 non-simulating Bostrom paths over a time factor, though at that point I think number of simulated universes created by all intelligences is a much more important figure in the math than time to reproduce at this point). I take this to mean that some layer of our existence is likely a simulation but perhaps the majority are black hole generated, or not.
4. In my mind, tracing this all back, in the beginning there were two things: 1. uncertainty, and (maybe) 2. a stage (spacetime). (possibly also energy/matter/stuff as #3). If gravity can be thought of as the effect that energy/matter has on spacetime, then in the beginning there is an impossibly long randomness that takes place, and at a certain point matter/energy happens to find itself concentrated enough to rip a hole in spacetime/create a black hole child universe (in the same way that primordial black holes may work). (Gravity being the first force that becomes individually defined after the big bang is in my mind an argument for its evolution/existence before other forces). Eventually, a perturbation like the strong force helps matter clump together much more easily, making child universes far out-procreate prior universes (why it makes sense the strong force separates next after the big bang). [I theorized that order of gravity --> strong --> everything else to form stars/galactic blackholes before looking up the order of de-unification, though subconscious could have factored in]
Hi Julian, this was a pleasure to read as always. I’ve followed most posts now, so the lions share of what is presented here I am familiar with. The one thing that I don’t think has been fully addressed and I have been curious about is mentioned briefly in a note for non-physicists: how are black holes and subsequent universes made for “essentially nothing”? I appreciate your comment about mass energy and gravitational energy being equal, but as a non-physicist I require a bit more rigorous explanation.
This has been a question of mine for almost a year now (I first heard about your Substack and theory over thanksgiving dinner 2022). Until now I had been assuming that the initial universe was just so incredibly (infinitely?) massive that it allowed for the creation of the theoretical trillions+ of offspring universes. I had also been assuming that the black holes, when created were essentially gateways to the child universe, and all the mass in the child universe corresponded with the mass that had been sucked into the black hole. Upon thinking about this more it seems inconsistent with the overall theory, but I had not had another explanation presented to counter it.
Anyway, more explanation of how universes are so cosmically cheap to produce would be much appreciated. I may possibly see you in San Francisco next week. Cheers.
First, Will Kinney's tweet did not deserve such a thoughtful response. Kinney said "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." This is a huge misunderstanding the anthropic principle, which does not require that most of the universe be hospitable for life. Even if only one observer comes into existence, the universe is sufficiently hospitable to be observed. The anthropic principle does NOT say this is the best possible universe for life. It only says that this is at least no worse than the worst possible universe for life. This may be the worst possible universe that can be observed.
Second, if every black hole is a universe, that is very bad news for us. Most black holes merge with other black holes. We have already seen some mergers, with LIGO. If our universe is inside a black hole inside another universe, the probability is that our black hole is orbiting another black hole and they will merge. What happens to a universe when it merges with another universe, with different physical parameters? I don't expect that is amenable to life, in either universe. Smolin's hypothesis does not explain why we happen to be in a universe whose black hole has not yet merged with another. Of course, observer selection would explain that, but then you don't need the rest of Smolin's hypothesis.
Third, this is not the best universe for making black holes. If the strange quark were a little lighter, more of our neutron stars would instead collapse into black holes. This is evidence against Smolin's hypothesis.
Fourth, all discussions of cyclic universes need to consider the nature of time. Smolin believes that time is real and fundamental, but (for example) Hawking believed time is emergent. If time is not fundamental, then there still might be an assembly of universes, but to say that one happened before another makes no sense. In short, the deeper question is whether time is inside or outside of the universe(s). If all the possible universes exist "at the same time" then understanding any interaction between them will require new physics. It may be that the ensemble of universes has a resonance pattern that favors universes that minimally support life. This is the "extremely-strong anthropic principle."
That was a hell of a lot of fun to read and I think is vastly closer than you think. I wonder if you are familiar with the concepts of Constructal Law (proposed by Adrian Bejan -- there's a conference that takes place in Oregon every year encompassing some of the concepts of it). The elements within Constructal Law would certainly impact your proposition. In addition, I was reading one segment and wondering if some of the deformation/mutations of universes could be explained by an occasional small bleed-through from the "parent" universe. Even something on the level of a few particles could throw off the equilibrium, causing greater variation. Or perhaps there is a framework where universes may (stress may) exist in a cluster formation, with very, very minor impacts on one another (the universal equivalent of "sex"). Given that we're speaking about the birth of universes from a black hole into no space/no time, could that be possible? Ending this with just a "great work!" Really enjoyed reading this.
Very interesting. One transition jumped out at me as needing more justification: the claim that a life-supporting universe will eventually have technology to generate small black holes, and that these will vastly outnumber naturally-occurring black holes, thus making the steps that lead up to them evolutionarily favored. My mind immediately asked: just how many technological black holes will there be in a universe like ours? Is it really "vastly greater" than the number of natural black holes?
To estimate an answer that question we need something akin to the Drake equation, with an additional factor to account for "proportion of technologically advanced civilizations that get as far as energy-producing black holes before becoming extinct". (There are times when I think that the odds of our civilization making it to the end of next week are slim.) Of course, this is extremely hard to estimate.
Then we must estimate how many black holes such a civilization would make. Obviously this is also very hard to estimate, but we should at least consider that making and managing energy-producing black holes is very hard and very expensive, and a planet like ours might produce only one or a handful. (For comparison, consider nuclear fusion: if energy-producing fusion reactors are much like current research projects such as ITER, very few countries or international alliances will be able to afford one, and even when the technology is perfected, they may be quite rare.)
Now, one might argue that "rare" is just fine: the overall hypothesis here implies that if it happens once, that universe will have lots of offspring. However, it's not necessarily the case that the rate of construction of technological black holes will grow in the child universes. We should consider the possibility that a universe where just a few technological black holes get built (or even none at all, because technological societies don't hang around long enough to get there) is sitting on a "local maximum" in evolutionary space, and that all the variations in the evolutionary space around that universe are worse for technological black holes, not better. In other words, the universes in which technological black holes dominate may not be reachable in evolutionary steps from this (or any other) starting point.
Anyway, the net of all that is that it's not a "slam dunk" that technological black holes will dominate over natural black holes. Once life gets involved (rather than "just" physics) lots of things can cause evolutionary paths to peter out. So that step, I feel, needs to be justified more strongly.
I love the way your philosophic, scientific writing resonates with truth, illuminating concepts with new perspective. I have tried to share your ideas, and with the exception of my 5 year old daughter and atheist best friend, they are rebutted with painful cognitive disodence; it physically hurts to contimplate that so much of what you *know* is inherently wrong.
If you haven't had the pleasure, please consider reading Paul Stamets 'Mycelium Running.' The similarity of the underground mycelial fungal networks one-cell wide, to brain cell pathways one-nueron wide, to a diagram of the computer internet one-computer wide, to the filiment like features modelled in some imaging of a younger universe one-solar system wide, to some visualizations of string theory dark matter. The intricately complex inter-connectedness is beautifully inspiring at all the levels humans are currently capable of imagining, so are likely to continue at all levels great, small, and far beyond our understanding.
It stretches many people's worldview to consider that the largest living organism on Earth is the Armillaria solidipes (Honey fungus). A mycelium network of this fungus in the pacific northwest spans 5.5 kilometres across, estimated it to be over 2000 years old. It stretches a worldview further to view this organism as an intelligent, communicative, keynote species in the biome. Imagine stretching this concept down to nuerons, and up to solar systems. Imagine still, as a network as grand as the universe or as tiny as quarks. I feel that networks like this extend beyond our human capacity to currently imagine, smallward, bigward, timeward, and universeward in directions and scopes our limited minds cannot fathom.
Morning here and the coffee hasn't kicked in yet. So apologies if this doesn't quite add up, but:
If intelligent life evolves towards making and controlling black holes, and these black holes come to dominate the number of possible universes, does that not imply a high probability that our own universe is one of those? That is, that we, and everything before and after us, lives and dies inside what might be called God's tabletop black-hole power generator? Not quite simulation theory (a fun idea, but I'm not overall a fan), but adjacent to it.
Then, if life /can/ evolve to control black holes - and does so for the purpose of energy generation - both of which sound reasonable to me, why would it seek to create the kind of black holes / universes which are themselves most hospitable towards life? I mean, if the type of black hole determines the type of universe it spawns, why would a species seek to create that particular type? (I guess you could run the argument in reverse.. a universe which creates species which create life-friendly black holes which in turn repeat the process is more reproductively successful.. which places "God" "Himself" within an ur-God's tabletop reactor, and so on).
And on mutation-reproduction-evolution - stating the obvious, mutations don't confer any advantage until they actually result in increased reproductive success. Evolution is generally understood to be lots of small steps (a mix of random and slightly advantageous) that - very occasionally - pass a tipping-point of some kind which opens up big new ecological niches, which lead to bursts of more rapid evolution.
Measured against this, the ability of a universe to create life complex enough to create and manipulate black holes feels like a bit of a "Eureka!" leap, like going from raptors to seagulls in one leap. The way I'm reading your framing, it would take many attempts to produce more and more complex life, but none of those iterations have any reproductive advantage. AIUI, the punctuated equilibria vs steady progress debate in evolutionary biology settled for "a bit of both", with mostly incremental change occasionally opening up a new niche resulting in rapid progress.. what I'm missing, I guess, is why there should be any selection at all in favour of complex-but-not-complex-enough-to-make-black-holes life.
Hi! New reader (and layman) so perhaps I can't find an article or research regarding infinite universes. It seems tautological to me that if there are infinite universes then that alone explains every detail about our own universe. But I haven't seen any evidence that there is more than 1 universe - I had thought that was resolved when hubble found there wasn't going to be a "big crunch". Again, apologies if I'm just not caught up.
Oh now this is good sir, very good. I have been marinating on this all day can't stop thinking about way's to dig even deeper provide even more proof. Let me know if you like any comments and ill notate them down.
Julian, I love your work and I found this essay endlessly fascinating. Before I say anything else, I must preface my commentary with the fact that I am not a physicist. Every corner of your essay you preceded with "Note for non-physicists", I smiled and waved. So from a physicists perspective, I may as well solely be a helpless meatbag to you. Perhaps like Will ignoring your long and delayed responses to his tweet (or to his X? what do we even call them now?), you too will ignore me and I will call you not an old grumpy man but a grumpy egghead. Jokes aside, I cannot provide commentary on your theory, so I hope I can provide feedback in the only other way I know possible and helpful. I pulled your content into a google doc and started going to work, giving feedback where I felt it would be helpful. I am through 5 of 16 pages so give me a few more hours or a few more days. My hope is that, should you decide to take snippets of this and turn it into a chapter in your book, that this feedback is any way shape or form, even in the slightest bit, helpful to you.
It is a pleasure reading your work and I admire your request for public feedback. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wHiy37kXcrOmi28fSzRj29xOsEE9XOCNzQvCbh4q2zo/edit?usp=sharing
Are you familiar with Robin Hanson's work thinking through the implications of the existence of aliens? https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/explaining-all-the-weird-ufo-aliens
Since your theory suggests that our universe is tuned to give rise to sentient life with the capacity to manufacture black holes, it heightens the mystery of why we don't see more evidence for them through our telescopes. Hanson does some impressive math to show what this implies. He's a very rigorous thinker unafraid to come to unpopular conclusions - I think you'd like him if not already acquainted.
Keep up the good work!
I agree with much of this and have stumbled here trying to find more posts on the finer details/thoughts that cosmological natural selection would lead to, seeing if anyone was writing along the lines of which I've been thinking.
Note: I know the subtitle of your article ends "so help me make it better", but I wouldn't want you to meaningfully take/present from the below as your own ideas. Not to be too up my own ass about my ideas, but they are meaningful to me.
Thoughts I've had along this area:
1. I do think the AP still has A LOT to do with the branch of universes we can find ourselves in. It's a prerequisite for this discussion that we are considering universes which eventually develop consciousness. If time can be thought of as real, then primordial blackholes generated in .0000...x% of the time of a galactic blackhole should far and away out-procreate universes with other types of blackholes which take astronomically (no pun intended) longer to form. If primordial black holes formed in 1 second and initial galactic black holes formed in ~500 million years, we're talking about 10^16 generations of primordial black hole universes before the first universe forms other black holes. One would theorize that the local maximum for black holes/child universes from primordial black holes would be extremely hard to outcompete / is probably the global TIME-ADJUSTED maximum. I can't find guestimates of the number of primordial black holes that could have been created, but given this natural selection / local maximum logic you'd think it wouldn't be wildly off in terms of black hole orders of magnitude we find from stellar/galactic black holes in our universe (this is pure conjecture, but if 10^16 generations of primordial-driven universes can occur for a single generation of galactic/stellar black hole universes, then I'm not sure anything but an insane order of magnitude jump would be enough for our type of universe to outnumber/outdenominator purely primordial driven ones.)
2. This might be an argument for dark matter as primordial black holes, especially if black hole universe generation is scale invariant (which it would seem to logically be, else finite resources/energy/matter runs out), and dark matter could be the 2nd/3rd evolution as you lay it out. If dark matter is primordial black holes, and each is enough to create a child universe, then it would stand to reason we'd have a universe as full as possible of tiny black holes. This might be a) an earlier leap than galactic blackholes (so 2nd perturbation or however you frame it), 2) also factor in to dark matter as a necessary condition for conciousness/AP, 3) be even more interesting if dark matter wasn't a meaningful/necessary factor for conciousness/AP (since that would be real evidence that there is primarily a weight towards more universe procreation and secondly a need for consciousness in order for us to be having this conversation). This could also be something of a testable hypothesis in terms of cosmological natural selection, at least in the affirmative (i.e. if dark matter does turn out to be primordial black holes, then the universe really does appear to be geared towards creating as many as possible). In the negative, I'm not sure it really disproves cosmological natural selection since it could be that dark matter was not an avenue for black hole creation, and dark matter itself might be necessary for optimal galactic black hole formation.
3. I'd argue that simulations are the next leap forward in fecundity as it relates to the AP. Universes which create intelligence to create universes add another factor here. Not sure how the cardinality stacks up against primordial, supermassive, or "common" black holes, and maybe it's not an order of magnitude difference, but even a small multiplier growing at the same exponential rate would dwarf the non-multiplier (non simulation generating) universes at some point. The time factors function differently here as we think of AP, since we are thinking of the time until we get to a level of consciousness approaching our own (for the sake of argument, 14B years) vs the time until we get to a level of intelligence able to create simulated universes (maybe 14.0001B years). So no longer are we comparing 1 second primordials to 500B galactic black hole universes, and we are able to pretty much negate the time factors here (it might make more sense to talk about the odds of the 2 non-simulating Bostrom paths over a time factor, though at that point I think number of simulated universes created by all intelligences is a much more important figure in the math than time to reproduce at this point). I take this to mean that some layer of our existence is likely a simulation but perhaps the majority are black hole generated, or not.
4. In my mind, tracing this all back, in the beginning there were two things: 1. uncertainty, and (maybe) 2. a stage (spacetime). (possibly also energy/matter/stuff as #3). If gravity can be thought of as the effect that energy/matter has on spacetime, then in the beginning there is an impossibly long randomness that takes place, and at a certain point matter/energy happens to find itself concentrated enough to rip a hole in spacetime/create a black hole child universe (in the same way that primordial black holes may work). (Gravity being the first force that becomes individually defined after the big bang is in my mind an argument for its evolution/existence before other forces). Eventually, a perturbation like the strong force helps matter clump together much more easily, making child universes far out-procreate prior universes (why it makes sense the strong force separates next after the big bang). [I theorized that order of gravity --> strong --> everything else to form stars/galactic blackholes before looking up the order of de-unification, though subconscious could have factored in]
Looking forward to any thoughts on the above.
Best,
Ben Dean
Hi Julian, this was a pleasure to read as always. I’ve followed most posts now, so the lions share of what is presented here I am familiar with. The one thing that I don’t think has been fully addressed and I have been curious about is mentioned briefly in a note for non-physicists: how are black holes and subsequent universes made for “essentially nothing”? I appreciate your comment about mass energy and gravitational energy being equal, but as a non-physicist I require a bit more rigorous explanation.
This has been a question of mine for almost a year now (I first heard about your Substack and theory over thanksgiving dinner 2022). Until now I had been assuming that the initial universe was just so incredibly (infinitely?) massive that it allowed for the creation of the theoretical trillions+ of offspring universes. I had also been assuming that the black holes, when created were essentially gateways to the child universe, and all the mass in the child universe corresponded with the mass that had been sucked into the black hole. Upon thinking about this more it seems inconsistent with the overall theory, but I had not had another explanation presented to counter it.
Anyway, more explanation of how universes are so cosmically cheap to produce would be much appreciated. I may possibly see you in San Francisco next week. Cheers.
First, Will Kinney's tweet did not deserve such a thoughtful response. Kinney said "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." This is a huge misunderstanding the anthropic principle, which does not require that most of the universe be hospitable for life. Even if only one observer comes into existence, the universe is sufficiently hospitable to be observed. The anthropic principle does NOT say this is the best possible universe for life. It only says that this is at least no worse than the worst possible universe for life. This may be the worst possible universe that can be observed.
Second, if every black hole is a universe, that is very bad news for us. Most black holes merge with other black holes. We have already seen some mergers, with LIGO. If our universe is inside a black hole inside another universe, the probability is that our black hole is orbiting another black hole and they will merge. What happens to a universe when it merges with another universe, with different physical parameters? I don't expect that is amenable to life, in either universe. Smolin's hypothesis does not explain why we happen to be in a universe whose black hole has not yet merged with another. Of course, observer selection would explain that, but then you don't need the rest of Smolin's hypothesis.
Third, this is not the best universe for making black holes. If the strange quark were a little lighter, more of our neutron stars would instead collapse into black holes. This is evidence against Smolin's hypothesis.
Fourth, all discussions of cyclic universes need to consider the nature of time. Smolin believes that time is real and fundamental, but (for example) Hawking believed time is emergent. If time is not fundamental, then there still might be an assembly of universes, but to say that one happened before another makes no sense. In short, the deeper question is whether time is inside or outside of the universe(s). If all the possible universes exist "at the same time" then understanding any interaction between them will require new physics. It may be that the ensemble of universes has a resonance pattern that favors universes that minimally support life. This is the "extremely-strong anthropic principle."
That was a hell of a lot of fun to read and I think is vastly closer than you think. I wonder if you are familiar with the concepts of Constructal Law (proposed by Adrian Bejan -- there's a conference that takes place in Oregon every year encompassing some of the concepts of it). The elements within Constructal Law would certainly impact your proposition. In addition, I was reading one segment and wondering if some of the deformation/mutations of universes could be explained by an occasional small bleed-through from the "parent" universe. Even something on the level of a few particles could throw off the equilibrium, causing greater variation. Or perhaps there is a framework where universes may (stress may) exist in a cluster formation, with very, very minor impacts on one another (the universal equivalent of "sex"). Given that we're speaking about the birth of universes from a black hole into no space/no time, could that be possible? Ending this with just a "great work!" Really enjoyed reading this.
Very interesting. One transition jumped out at me as needing more justification: the claim that a life-supporting universe will eventually have technology to generate small black holes, and that these will vastly outnumber naturally-occurring black holes, thus making the steps that lead up to them evolutionarily favored. My mind immediately asked: just how many technological black holes will there be in a universe like ours? Is it really "vastly greater" than the number of natural black holes?
To estimate an answer that question we need something akin to the Drake equation, with an additional factor to account for "proportion of technologically advanced civilizations that get as far as energy-producing black holes before becoming extinct". (There are times when I think that the odds of our civilization making it to the end of next week are slim.) Of course, this is extremely hard to estimate.
Then we must estimate how many black holes such a civilization would make. Obviously this is also very hard to estimate, but we should at least consider that making and managing energy-producing black holes is very hard and very expensive, and a planet like ours might produce only one or a handful. (For comparison, consider nuclear fusion: if energy-producing fusion reactors are much like current research projects such as ITER, very few countries or international alliances will be able to afford one, and even when the technology is perfected, they may be quite rare.)
Now, one might argue that "rare" is just fine: the overall hypothesis here implies that if it happens once, that universe will have lots of offspring. However, it's not necessarily the case that the rate of construction of technological black holes will grow in the child universes. We should consider the possibility that a universe where just a few technological black holes get built (or even none at all, because technological societies don't hang around long enough to get there) is sitting on a "local maximum" in evolutionary space, and that all the variations in the evolutionary space around that universe are worse for technological black holes, not better. In other words, the universes in which technological black holes dominate may not be reachable in evolutionary steps from this (or any other) starting point.
Anyway, the net of all that is that it's not a "slam dunk" that technological black holes will dominate over natural black holes. Once life gets involved (rather than "just" physics) lots of things can cause evolutionary paths to peter out. So that step, I feel, needs to be justified more strongly.
I love the way your philosophic, scientific writing resonates with truth, illuminating concepts with new perspective. I have tried to share your ideas, and with the exception of my 5 year old daughter and atheist best friend, they are rebutted with painful cognitive disodence; it physically hurts to contimplate that so much of what you *know* is inherently wrong.
If you haven't had the pleasure, please consider reading Paul Stamets 'Mycelium Running.' The similarity of the underground mycelial fungal networks one-cell wide, to brain cell pathways one-nueron wide, to a diagram of the computer internet one-computer wide, to the filiment like features modelled in some imaging of a younger universe one-solar system wide, to some visualizations of string theory dark matter. The intricately complex inter-connectedness is beautifully inspiring at all the levels humans are currently capable of imagining, so are likely to continue at all levels great, small, and far beyond our understanding.
It stretches many people's worldview to consider that the largest living organism on Earth is the Armillaria solidipes (Honey fungus). A mycelium network of this fungus in the pacific northwest spans 5.5 kilometres across, estimated it to be over 2000 years old. It stretches a worldview further to view this organism as an intelligent, communicative, keynote species in the biome. Imagine stretching this concept down to nuerons, and up to solar systems. Imagine still, as a network as grand as the universe or as tiny as quarks. I feel that networks like this extend beyond our human capacity to currently imagine, smallward, bigward, timeward, and universeward in directions and scopes our limited minds cannot fathom.
Morning here and the coffee hasn't kicked in yet. So apologies if this doesn't quite add up, but:
If intelligent life evolves towards making and controlling black holes, and these black holes come to dominate the number of possible universes, does that not imply a high probability that our own universe is one of those? That is, that we, and everything before and after us, lives and dies inside what might be called God's tabletop black-hole power generator? Not quite simulation theory (a fun idea, but I'm not overall a fan), but adjacent to it.
Then, if life /can/ evolve to control black holes - and does so for the purpose of energy generation - both of which sound reasonable to me, why would it seek to create the kind of black holes / universes which are themselves most hospitable towards life? I mean, if the type of black hole determines the type of universe it spawns, why would a species seek to create that particular type? (I guess you could run the argument in reverse.. a universe which creates species which create life-friendly black holes which in turn repeat the process is more reproductively successful.. which places "God" "Himself" within an ur-God's tabletop reactor, and so on).
And on mutation-reproduction-evolution - stating the obvious, mutations don't confer any advantage until they actually result in increased reproductive success. Evolution is generally understood to be lots of small steps (a mix of random and slightly advantageous) that - very occasionally - pass a tipping-point of some kind which opens up big new ecological niches, which lead to bursts of more rapid evolution.
Measured against this, the ability of a universe to create life complex enough to create and manipulate black holes feels like a bit of a "Eureka!" leap, like going from raptors to seagulls in one leap. The way I'm reading your framing, it would take many attempts to produce more and more complex life, but none of those iterations have any reproductive advantage. AIUI, the punctuated equilibria vs steady progress debate in evolutionary biology settled for "a bit of both", with mostly incremental change occasionally opening up a new niche resulting in rapid progress.. what I'm missing, I guess, is why there should be any selection at all in favour of complex-but-not-complex-enough-to-make-black-holes life.
Anyhow... thanks for a fascinating read!
Hi! New reader (and layman) so perhaps I can't find an article or research regarding infinite universes. It seems tautological to me that if there are infinite universes then that alone explains every detail about our own universe. But I haven't seen any evidence that there is more than 1 universe - I had thought that was resolved when hubble found there wasn't going to be a "big crunch". Again, apologies if I'm just not caught up.
sure, that all adds up
Oh now this is good sir, very good. I have been marinating on this all day can't stop thinking about way's to dig even deeper provide even more proof. Let me know if you like any comments and ill notate them down.