this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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Earth’s Organisms Developed Via Evolution. Some Theorists Wonder: What if the Entire Cosmos Did, Too? (www.smithsonianmag.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Delta_V@lemmy.world to c/space@mander.xyz
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...Historically, scientists have viewed the cosmos as akin to a rock—complex, perhaps even beautiful, but formed through arbitrary events. Evolutionary cosmologists instead argue that universes, like living organisms, grow and reproduce, spinning off new universes with small variations from their progenitors. In doing so, these cosmic offspring are refined across generations into forms that maximize the number of universes yet to be born. Since the Big Bang, our universe, like any developing child, has been unfurling into an optimal shape.

Under this view, the universe is not a rock. It is an egg...

Smolin’s work was, in turn, inspired by physicists Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler, who proposed that singularities inside black holes, the places where matter is crushed into a point of infinite density, might expand to produce new universes that follow different physics from the universes that produced them. Every universe—including our own—would, under this logic, have emerged from a Big Bang within a black hole.

Smolin realized that this hypothetical process would allow universes to reproduce, in a way, by making more black holes. And if those new universes could inherit the physics of their parents with small differences—just as new organisms inherit the genes of their parents with small differences—then universes could also evolve with each generation. Specifically, a form of cosmic natural selection would favor universes that make as many black holes as possible. Less fertile universes could persist, but they would produce far fewer offspring. So over time, an increasingly high proportion of universes would be optimized for black hole production—which would imply that our universe, given the odds, is one of those...

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If I were to write this as hard science fiction, I would say that the countless possible multidimensional foldings of string theory could fill the role of genetic code. The black hole/big bang bottleneck (no longer a proper singularity) then creates a brief window in which energies are raised high enough that the folding specification can mutate, but the window is so brief that only a tiny fraction of folding possibilities are affected each time. Thus a child universe inherits the folding specification of a parent universe with slight mutations. Because this bottleneck has such incredibly high energy the vacuum energy of the mutations doesn't matter in the moment of mutation, allowing the mutations to be random.

Now, after this new universe has expanded (assuming it is viable with its mutations), the vacuum energy settles on some metastable point. In this metastable point, the vast majority of the folding specification doesn't really matter. Supersymmetry, if true, would be an example of such a latent part of the folding specification in our universe. Perhaps in our universe there is a fourth generation of particles that weighs as much as a small planet, we simply don't know, and so this fourth generation is free to mutate across our line of universes without affecting universe reproductive rate.

What this means is that the folding specification has "junk DNA" to work with. Universes aren't just doing some sort of gradient descent, sometimes a mutation will drop a previously latent structure down into the range where it actually affects how the universe functions.

Like suppose this fourth generation with particles the mass of planets had leptons that weighed as much as quarks. It wouldn't matter to us, but if a child universe happens to reduce the mass of fourth generation particles to be less than an up quark, suddenly out of nowhere you have fourth-generation protons that are lighter than first-generation ones but which need to interact with fouth-generation leptons that are much heavier than electrons for purposes of the weak nuclear force. This would usually have a negative effect on universe reproductive capability, but sometimes a positive one.