Fluorescent Dreams Wax Cylinders - The evolution of universes and the anthropic principle...

Competition is an unnecessary assumption here. All that's needed is to suppose that universes which generate life are also more likely to produce daughter universes.

Suppose, for example, that a daughter universe is created when something like two warp engine cores collide. This will be a rare event in a universe without life, since it requires these warp cores to arrange themselves by blind chance. Say a lifeless universe breeds ten daughters. But a universe with life eventually breeds all sorts of interstellar empires and they go about their merry little wars and so have lots of exciting collisions. So they produce, let's say, a thousand children. Assuming that life-bearing universes are likely to generate life-bearing universes and lifeless ones lifeless ones is implicit in supposing the daughter universe is very like the mother. (We'll ignore for now that sometimes a lifeless will give birth to a life-bearing and vice-versa, on the grounds that this makes the mathematics simpler.)

With one lifeless and one living universe in the first ``generation'' (I'm not saying what starts and ends a generation) there are then ten lifeless and a thousand life-bearing universes in the second. Then there are a hundred lifeless and a million life-bearing in the third.

Very swiftly, as universe lifespans go, the probability that any randomly chosen universe is life-bearing grows close to 1, simply because they outbreed the lifeless ones. You can fiddle with the rates if you want, but if you suppose enough generations then you can get the overwhelming probability of a life-bearing universe from it, and they needn't compete for any resource.

If you take the anthropic view seriously, anyway. And if you're willing to make the assumptions that universes breed daughter universes and that whether they're life-bearing correlates to the rate of universe generation.

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Dang. You're right. Competition isn't necessary, just that life-bearing universes are more likely to create daughters.

Going into science-fiction fare... in this idea, it doesn't matter if, in order to create the daughter universes, life wipes itself out. So the creation of an Ultra-Sooper "Reverse the Polarity!" bomb might be a trap that the universe evolved toward. Though it wipes out all life for seven technobabbles around, if it creates a daughter universe, all is well.

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Very swiftly, as universe lifespans go, the probability that any randomly chosen universe is life-bearing grows close to 1, simply because they outbreed the lifeless ones.

You do make the assumption, though, that there are no resources required and that an infinite number of universes can exist with no problem. Toss in any resources or dimensional limitations and you effect competition.

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If universes compete, I have no clue over what they would compete.

Why, for greater slices of spacetime from whatever superdimension the universes live in! Without life to observe, there would be no Hubble radius -- so the longer you can maintain life within your universe, the larger that radius becomes, and the more of you is "fixed".

This assumes that universes do not collapse, of course, but that's another strategy: don't have too much dark matter. Universes probably have diet books to indicate the correct percentages...

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I am reading Smolin myself at the moment (3 Roads To Quantum Gravity). I would think you can't differentiate a universe from any life it contains. If there's life in a universe, it's part of that universe. If the universe is 'using' life (a hell of a tool to wield) to make other universes, hell, do anything, then it would seem more like life is using life to make other universes, not the other way around.

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"A duck is an egg's way of making more eggs."

Since the universe existed first, I tend to see it as the creator and us the tool, rather than the other way around.

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That's not my point, my point isn't about what comes first, it's about whether you can profitably draw a line between the two (seeing as how life's collapsing waveforms everywhere). If the universe can be said to be using something, that ascribes intention, and from there, the slippery slope to animism or hylozoism.

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Okay. I see what you're saying.

I apologize for anthropomorphizing the universe.

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Your third assumption makes me wonder - why assume that the presence of life is a competitive advantage?
What if it is nothing more than one of many possible mutations?
The conditions influencing whether this mutation is helpful, harmful, or neutral might then only be observable in an entire population of universes.

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*grin* I thought of that, too. That's why I said it was "a strategy" rather than "the strategy".

And, yeah -- I wish that I could see the whole population of universes and all the different ways that they've evolved!

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I was actually not thinking of life as one of several possible strategies so much as I was thinking it wasn't a strategy at all.

That's where the Sci-Fi story plot turns into something like: "Will the existence of life be enough to save our Universe and it's kind from extinction in the ultimate battle for resources? If few remaining life-supporting galaxies can overcome their differences enough to unite, they just might have a slim chance..."

Perhaps even sarcastically written from the point of view of a bored scientist assigned to observe this whole scenario as part of her field research for grad school studies.

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The anthropic principle says that the universe we see must support life; otherwise, no life would be around to see it.

the anthropic principle is what I like to call "Brain trash" Its the end result of thinking gone way too far and has now become useless. Such questions as "If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it" Its stupid, Of course it makes a sound because the act of making sound is independent of an observer. When the universe itself formed there was no life at all, but it still formed none the less. Things don't cease to be just because they fall out of observation. Nor do they create an observer just to validate its existence.

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The point of philosophybrain trash is that the answers to a lot of seemingly obvious questions are not so obvious if you think about them a bit harder, or try to convince someone else of your obvious answer.

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Actually, that's the weak anthropic principle: 'we exist because if this universe wasn't hospitable to life like ours, we wouldn't be here to discuss it'.

The strong anthropic principle is 'the universe IS the way it is to allow life to exist'.

Universes can generate daughter universes, which are similar but not identical to the mother universe

There are several models which allow for this. But more interesting from the perspective of your proposal is the idea that if the universe is truely infinite in size, there could be 'pocket universes' within it with different local laws.

Universes compete for some resource.

Technically, parallel universes can't interact (I say technically because most parallel universe models, including Everett's original one, have ways for them to interact), so competition doesn't work. But in the pocket universe model, they could.

Life is a "strategy" that lets universes to compete better

Put the previous two together: and here you are. :)

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