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- Hacker News
- Kind of hard to have natural selection atemporally. Anyway keep dancing around the (fixed) point.by morpheos137
- I was deeply influenced by encountering your work at the time I did, thank you and keep it up :) great to see you on HNby cmrx64
- Hey, thanks. Fun to be here! I love these ideas, I'm delighted people are interested in debating them.by JulianPGough
- I think it makes sense. Life as we know may not have a defined "edge" between alive and not alive. Simply a spectrum.
All life as we know does seem to reproduce but maybe a better definition is that it increases something similar to chaos or entropy.
by Melatonic - I watched a talk by Lee Smolin and he seems to have a great take on how physics relates to life. That moment to moment the universe supports and runs on spontaneity and free will. I'd love to find a really good summation of his ideas.by euroderf
- 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
- by Giefo6ah
- Maybe thinking of Titius-Bode laws? Or perhaps the notion of Musica universalis? These are not taken too seriously since they do not hold to close observation.by smashers1114
- Maybe you mean Orbital resonance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonanceby acro
- Yes, they slip into resonances. This is even more pronounced in the case of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The resonances give them stability. As I've written before, elsewhere; 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. But of course, the question then is WHY are the basic parameters of matter, and the laws of physics, tuned so that this is the natural result! What tuned them? I would argue, evolution is the answer.
For those interested, I've written further about this here: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/life-without-stars-stanets-an...
by JulianPGough - > 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 - In a crude way, you could say so. Certainly, looked at through a purely evolutionary lens, the meaning of life for universes is (in one respect) to make as many black holes as possible. That maximises reproductive success for the unit of selection that is the universe. But of course, once consciousness enters the picture, things get more complicated. If conscious beings are generating most of the black holes in a universe for energy production (that are, as a side effect, generating child universes elsewhere, outside that parent universe), then the intelligent lifeforms making those black holes are going to feel some moral obligation to the child universes they're generating at the other side of those black holes. And if they have any control over the basic parameters of matter in the child universes, then perhaps they optimise for universes of a particular kind. They might not go for sheer numbers of offspring in the child universes. They might instead try to minimise unnecessary suffering in the child universe. They might not want the universes to generate life at all, because that's quite a moral weight to bear. Or they might want them to be maximally life producing, because life is intrinsically a good thing, from their point of view. It could go a number of ways. But it would certainly be true that a blind evolutionary search of the possibility space, in order to maximise black hole production, is no longer the case.by JulianPGough
- 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
- That's a fair point. I suspect that any journalist trying to write about this subject for a respectable mainstream publication (like the Smithsonian Magazine) has to negotiate pretty hard with his or her editor to get the piece to run at all. So a carefully edited secondary piece of journalism like this will tend to be a lot more conservative than the raw primary work it is based on (such as my posts). But that's fine, that's just how the ecosystem works. I'm free to push these ideas as hard as I can, and the mainstream can then sift through them, filter them, and run the ones that seem most solid. That's good, that's healthy! Some of my wilder ideas are very likely to be wrong! In fact, I was surprised to see so many mainstream scientists prepared to be quoted in this piece, even offering cautious support. It feels as though a paradigm shift might be starting to happen.by JulianPGough
- 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 - Read it recently and that sounds right.
It's strangely tautological to me but I only have my lifetime to consider, not the age of the solar system.
- A more physical way to think through this may be: imagine many many bits of rock all with their own semi random velocity. The overall system has an angular momentum that must be preserved. So as these bits of rock accrete you end up with orbits of large bodies that all must add up to the initial angular momentum of the system. Since every planet is a conglomeration of many bits it is extremely likely that all orbits are in the same rotational direction, though not guaranteed.by smashers1114
- Fun fact: this really only works in three dimensions.
In three, angular momentum in one axis is maintained. Everything else cancels out. More, and you get clouds.
- Sagan is terrific. And it's true that the planets and moons that survive have made it through a pretty brutal era of orbit-clearance. But the evolutionary cosmology model I and others have been exploring is at the level of universes, and is genuinely Darwinian; it gives an evolutionary explanation for why our universe has parameters of matter that allow for the generation of long-term stable planets, and the development of lifeforms on those planets, and the development of technologies by those lifeforms. I would love you to read the Smithsonian Magazine piece and come back to me; it's a beautiful explanation of why universes contain little blue dots at all! I think Sagan would have loved it. Maybe not been convinced by it (it's still a speculative theory, though it is currently having predictive successes), but he would certainly have thought it worth exploring.by JulianPGough
- 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 - The universe is the replicator. This comes directly from John Wheeler's old idea, which he came up with back in the 1970s to solve the two mysteries in our universe that involve singularities: black holes, and the Big Bang. I've written about this a lot, so I'm happy to go into more detail:
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 his paper Did the Universe Evolve?, and his book The Life of the Cosmos.
So, Smolin had uncovered a powerful evolutionary implication, hidden inside Wheeler’s simple model of the reproduction of universes.
by JulianPGough - 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 - Thank you!by chistev