I haven't read it (though I have heard good things about MacLeod). Unfortunately, Learning the World was published late in the year my daughter was born, a year in which I subsequently read almost nothing at all... I'm intrigued by the mention of the selection effect on the parameters of new universes though... If you can find the reference/take a photo/screenshot it, I'd love to see it.
I haven't read it (though I have heard good things about MacLeod). Unfortunately, Learning the World was published late in the year my daughter was born, a year in which I subsequently read almost nothing at all... I'm intrigued by the mention of the selection effect on the parameters of new universes though... If you can find the reference/take a photo/screenshot it, I'd love to see it.
A theme of the book is evolution at a few different levels. In generation ships, the people who self-select to go on them are the footloose. This leads to evolution over time. This is echoed at the level of evolution of universes - quotes relevant to that theme below.
Page 191
Sublime as the sight was, it took a knowledge of what it did to take the full measure of its magnificence. Like its polar counterpart in the rearward cone, the titanic engine was a cosmogonic machine. At its core was a process that — second by second when it powered the ship's flight, hour by hour when, as now, it powered only the sunline — compacted the equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear explosion into a space the size of a hydrogen atom. Its primary effect was to accelerate the reaction mass to relativistic velocities. As a side effect, invisible but inevitable, it generated universes. From each compacted explosion, like a stray spark from a hammer, a new singularity exploded out of space-time and inflated in an instant to give birth to a new cosmos. Some inconceivably minute fraction of the energy of that inflation could be tapped to make the engine selfsustaining. Invented in the Moon Caves, the cosmogonic engine had given man the stars. At one level efficient beyond cavil, on another it was the most profligate of man's devices: it blew multiple universes like bubbles, for the mere sake of moving mass, and at an average speed of 0.01 c at that.
Page 302
“The engine generates new universes all the time. These universes are similar but not identical to the one we live in, yes?”
"To the best of our knowledge, yes," he said. "Information is conserved."
"Well then," I said, "what that means is that in some of these universes, there will be starships with cosmogonic engines of their own."
His expression was inscrutable. “That would seem to follow, yes.”
"So," I went on, "just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in, than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?"
[…]
“What inference do you draw from it?”
I stalled. “That we’re not the first,” I said. “Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We’re a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars.”
[…]
"Goodbye, Constantine," I said. "I just wanted to ask. You said information is conserved. How much information?"
“More than you might think,” said the Oldest Man.
[...]
The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved — then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.
Oh, this is terrific. He's using Cosmological Natural Selection with Intelligence (CNS-I) as a literal plot engine! You can thank one of the other commenters on this thread, James Smart, in part for that. He and the philosopher Clément Vidal, the mathematician Louis Crane, the cosmologist Edward Harrison, and a couple of others came up with and developed the idea of intelligent life as a driver of the reproductive success of universes (by making artificial black holes). There's a good history of it here (scroll down to the section headed "CNS with Intelligence (CNS-I)"):
I haven't read it (though I have heard good things about MacLeod). Unfortunately, Learning the World was published late in the year my daughter was born, a year in which I subsequently read almost nothing at all... I'm intrigued by the mention of the selection effect on the parameters of new universes though... If you can find the reference/take a photo/screenshot it, I'd love to see it.
**SOME PARTIAL SPOILERS for Learning the World**
A theme of the book is evolution at a few different levels. In generation ships, the people who self-select to go on them are the footloose. This leads to evolution over time. This is echoed at the level of evolution of universes - quotes relevant to that theme below.
Page 191
Sublime as the sight was, it took a knowledge of what it did to take the full measure of its magnificence. Like its polar counterpart in the rearward cone, the titanic engine was a cosmogonic machine. At its core was a process that — second by second when it powered the ship's flight, hour by hour when, as now, it powered only the sunline — compacted the equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear explosion into a space the size of a hydrogen atom. Its primary effect was to accelerate the reaction mass to relativistic velocities. As a side effect, invisible but inevitable, it generated universes. From each compacted explosion, like a stray spark from a hammer, a new singularity exploded out of space-time and inflated in an instant to give birth to a new cosmos. Some inconceivably minute fraction of the energy of that inflation could be tapped to make the engine selfsustaining. Invented in the Moon Caves, the cosmogonic engine had given man the stars. At one level efficient beyond cavil, on another it was the most profligate of man's devices: it blew multiple universes like bubbles, for the mere sake of moving mass, and at an average speed of 0.01 c at that.
Page 302
“The engine generates new universes all the time. These universes are similar but not identical to the one we live in, yes?”
"To the best of our knowledge, yes," he said. "Information is conserved."
"Well then," I said, "what that means is that in some of these universes, there will be starships with cosmogonic engines of their own."
His expression was inscrutable. “That would seem to follow, yes.”
"So," I went on, "just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in, than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?"
[…]
“What inference do you draw from it?”
I stalled. “That we’re not the first,” I said. “Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We’re a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars.”
[…]
"Goodbye, Constantine," I said. "I just wanted to ask. You said information is conserved. How much information?"
“More than you might think,” said the Oldest Man.
[...]
The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved — then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.
Oh, this is terrific. He's using Cosmological Natural Selection with Intelligence (CNS-I) as a literal plot engine! You can thank one of the other commenters on this thread, James Smart, in part for that. He and the philosopher Clément Vidal, the mathematician Louis Crane, the cosmologist Edward Harrison, and a couple of others came up with and developed the idea of intelligent life as a driver of the reproductive success of universes (by making artificial black holes). There's a good history of it here (scroll down to the section headed "CNS with Intelligence (CNS-I)"):
https://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection_(fecund_universes)
(And thanks for going to the trouble of assembling these quotes, I really appreciate it.)