Earth's organisms developed via evolution. What if the cosmos did, too?
Last year, I wrote a speculative cosmology piece called Blowtorch Theory. It rather cheekily extended the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin's wonderful, powerful, oddly neglected theory of cosmological natural selection; the idea that universes reproduce, with variation, leading to Darwinian evolution of universes. While I was having dinner with my five-year-old, a friend texted to say that the piece was at number one on Hacker News. At the time, I didn't really know anything about the website, or its readers – but I learned a LOT over the next few hours, as my dinner went cold (and my son got to watch cartoons)! Anyway, I greatly enjoyed (most of) the robust discussion that followed there, and thought Hacker News readers might be interested in this new Smithsonian Magazine overview of the remarkably healthy state of evolutionary cosmology, a new field emerging around these ideas. Think of it as a startup disrupting cosmology!
Discussion Highlights (14 comments)
chistev
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.
dang
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)
cmrx64
I was deeply influenced by encountering your work at the time I did, thank you and keep it up :) great to see you on HN
bolangi
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.
andrewflnr
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.
JumpCrisscross
If black holes contain universes (idk, maybe dimensionally reduced ones), this strikes me as more likely than bullshit. Not likely. But real enough to be worth toying with.
gmuslera
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.
kwamenum86
Evolution is the only universal principle. Governs everything that happens in our reality and all realities. Gets really trippy when you consider the ways in which evolution itself evolves - that largely explains the biodiversity we see on earth Check out The Case Against Reality for more color
qsera
I am a total layman. But I believe that MUH (Max Tegmark) is the real thing. I was once looking at fractal animations on youtube. At one point, I thought I saw things move in it in a way that resembles physical movement. That caused me to ask if there could be a fractal where things moved or behaved in accordance with the physical laws of our universe (As I pursued this idea, I came across MUH from Tegmark [1]). And if such a fractal (or a mathematical structure) exhaustively implements all our physical laws, it follows that we will observe eventual emergence of consciousness life. Of course, random events should also occur to support emergence of life. The randomness that one observe in such a world would also be a deterministic property of the structure it inhabits. So slightly different structures could only differ in a single random event. Thus it follows that there are variant structures where any random events (apart from the deterministic physical laws) manifest. Thus it follows that if live in our universe is the result of the physical laws of this universe, and some set of random events, there will be a mathematical structure as I described above, where this manifests. I like or believe this idea because it, in one fell swoop, answers all the difficult and seemingly unanswerable questions like Who created the universe, or Why do we exist or What is the purpose of existence or What was there before the universe etc etc... [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646
slibhb
> 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?
Melatonic
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.
naveen99
You don’t need black holes for a bang. Super novae exist.
jack_h
> “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.
morpheos137
Kind of hard to have natural selection atemporally. Anyway keep dancing around the (fixed) point.