THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
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Founded January 1970
2021-2022: CXIV
"Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think." -Werner Heisenberg
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Thursday, April 28, 2022
The Darwinian Universe
You are here.
Yes, we're stating the obvious.
However, the fact that you are here: breathing, thinking, living,thriving, eating, drinking, working, loving and existing with rapturous abandon constitutes a miracle of improbabilities. You are here because your antecedents were sufficiently strong and so well suited to their respective environments that they survived their reckless youths and then experienced an exquisite procreational period. Many humans, alas, did not. Moreover, most species (about 99%) that once wandered our sometimes-severe Mother Earth also perished due to the merciless evolutionary process.
Is it possible that this same pitiless process operates on the cosmological scale? Well, that is the basis of the "Darwinian Universe" hypothesis. Here's the rub.
A black hole forms and produces an entirely new Universe. This child Universe, for lack of a better term, might be quite similar to the parent Universe or entirely different. For instance, its fundamental physical forces might be stronger, weaker or its forces might be utterly unlike those that operate within the parent Universe. The child Universe might implode in on itself within a micro-second, if the gravitational force were stronger or its matter might never coalesce to form galaxies, stars and planets if the gravity were weaker. So, in the first instance, the spawned Universe would perish in its infancy. In the second instance, the Universe would persist for eons, but wouldn't form any black holes and so couldn't produce offspring.
Only those Universes with the right conditions would be capable of forming stars. Those Universes would also produce black holes, which, in turn, would produce offspring Universes. How many black holes could produce viable Universes capable of reproduction? Who's to say? It might be just one in a billion. That might seem extreme, but nature shows us otherwise. Remember that the sperm cell that resulted in you swam upstream in the company of millions of less fortunate competitors.
Our cosmos has likely produced trillions of black holes. After all, the Milky Way's estimated black hole population exceeds 100 million. If this Darwinian Universe hypothesis is correct -which we might never prove- then our own Universe perhaps has given rise to many Universes that will produce others that, themselves, will also spawn others, ad infinitum. And, yes, this means that our own Universe just happened to form out of a black hole in another Universe.
While this notion sounds appealing, particularly to those who are uncomfortable with the prospect that our own Universe stands alone and all its parameters were finely tuned, it doesn't address the question of how physical reality started. How was the first Universe formed? Or, is it even correct to discuss "first Universes?" Like all origin myths and theories, the "Darwinian Universe" hypothesis has little to say about the actual beginning of anything.
However, next time you observe a swarm of helicopter seeds fluttering down from a maple tree or the next time you see a green haze along your car's hood, realize that you're watching the same reproductive process that might well be operating on the grandest scale of all: that of infinitely replicating multiverses.
Deep breath.
By the way, just so you know, we are glad you're here.
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