Re: Life in the Cosmos

as far as I can guess, he proposes an
origin of past-eternal oscillation where evidently there never was an
open universe that failed to generate a black hole until there were
multiple universes that started to generate multiple black holes. Does
this sound like a correct interpretation of CNS?

I haven't read that book, but it sounds like Smolin. Now, I think you
have to think of a lot of "possible universes" some of which are
"stillborn". If a universe fails to generate even one black hole, it
dies without descendants. If it generates exactly one black hole, it's
an "oscillating universe" that can live "forever" (in the sense that it
has one child that has one child and so on.) But if it has two or more
'children', then we see a potential for growth.

Now look at the spectrum of all possible universes after a long time,
as it were. *Most* universes will arise from parents that had a lot of
children, in some sense.

Analogy: consider life on Earth (or in the Universe). *Most* life has
parents of some kind, but a few organisms did spontaneously arise (we
believe). If out of the space of "all possible life forms" you pick one
at random, it is very likely to be one with parents and a long history
of evolution behind it. Smolin posits that universes work the same way
- that if universes can reproduce via making black holes, (a viable
concept when you consider mass inflation) then if we pick a universe at
random, it's overwhelmingly probable to be one with a long history of
evolution behind it, evolution that shapes the initial conditions to
make universes that are good at making black holes, just as flies are
good at making lots of eggs.

One could argue for niche evolution, for example if there were a design
of universe that would spawn exactly two universes after 63 Planck
times, there could be an AWFUL LOT of those, but one imagines that such
a Wolframesque universe would fall afoul of the anthropic principle.
I.e., sure there are a lot of them, but none of them have physicists or
newsgroups for them to write in.

.

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