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  • I can't find the reference, but there are many integer or near-integer relationships among the planets of our solar system. Such a preponderance that it seems improbable.
    by bolangi
  • > Some futurist philosophers had extended the idea to explain the emergence of complex life from hot gas and stars. Humans exploit increasingly powerful energy sources, a progression they argued could culminate in artificial black holes. If those black holes spawned new universes, then a cosmos capable of producing technologically advanced life might produce more offspring. The progression from hot gas to stars, life and technology could, they proposed, be a product of cosmic natural selection.

    So the meaning of life is to make as many black holes as possible?

    by slibhb
  • You claim an increasingly high proportion of universes must be adapted to black hole creation.

    You also claim it might explain the fine tuning problem.

    I’d argue it does neither. As to the first claim; First the variations are random, secondly black holes radiate away. You don’t have an infinite chain of black hole production here.

    As for the second one, again the variation is random and each is isolated from another. This is just falling back to the anthropic principle.

    Also I fail to see how this is falsifiable (or provable) and therefore even a scientific hypothesis at all.

    by anon48293
  • > “He’s correct. … Why wouldn’t it [evolution] apply to universes when it applies to everything else?”

    I kind of wish the article touched on "everything" a bit more. Biological evolution is not the only process characterized by variation, selection, and retention repeated over time. Language is another system that displays these properties, something known before Darwin wrote "On the Origin of Species". Darwin himself noted this in terms of morality in "The Descent of Man" whereby certain morals could help some tribes to outcompete other tribes allowing those morals to become more prevalent. Friedrich Carl von Savigny noted this in relation to the law. Carl Menger noted this in relation to money, markets, division of labor, the law, and the like. I think one of the most profoundly insightful books I've ever read was F.A. Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit" where he ties a lot of these threads together.

    So while the "birth" and "death" of universes may be a bit too analogous to biological evolution specifically, I think it is entirely plausible that the order we call the universe could arise from some process of variation, selection, and retention repeated over time.

    by jack_h
  • I think it's worth noting that the universe-selection theory outlined in this article is a lot more conservative than the full Blowtorch Theory about cosmic structure formation.
    by andrewflnr
  • I think it was in the book Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan where I read that why the planets orbit in circular motion is because they are the planets that survived what must have been a chaotic early universe.

    In the early universe, those planetary bodies must have been moving in different ways and colliding into one another, and the rate of collisions must have been very high.

    Ultimately, the constant collisions led to eventual clearing off of bodies that did not move in circular motion, and that's what we see today. A natural selection of objects of the cosmos.

    I might be misremembering Carl Sagan's description. But I'm almost certain I read this in Pale Blue Dot. I keep meaning to re-read that book.

    by chistev
  • Where is the replicator? Evolution doesn’t happen just because. Copies are made, not all identical, some get to the next iteration, and if what makes them different gives them better chances to get to the next stage, then that difference may remain.

    Where that plays with universes?

    I get that if they are infinite amounts of universes, the ones with conditions of evolving intelligence hace more chances to be observed from within, but more or less that’s it.

    by gmuslera
  • Last year's thread (mentioned in OP's text above):

    The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 - May 2025 (170 comments)

    by dang

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