The Obvious Super-Strong Anthropic Argument

civilization’s ultimate function is cosmogenesis

Fermi Paradox solutions should be weird. Not knowing the specific answer, my gut feeling tells me the answer will be more than sci-fi-weird. It will be far more weird and outrageous than our imagination has been able to contemplate. To set bearings, the simulation argument is very weird. It is weird enough to feel satisfying, which has helped its recent popularity.

Imagine my disappointment when I realized that the super-strong anthropic argument I considered obvious had barely been discussed. I considered it so obvious that I assumed it was already published. I assumed this so hard that I described an apocalyptic variation of the argument, not realizing that the original argument doesn’t exist.

This Argument

• Black holes create 1 or more new universes, this is true for all universes in the multi-verse
• Universes that produced more baby universes were selected for; black hole production was optimized though this process
• This continued until 1 or more universe developed intelligent life
• Civilizations in life-bearing universes created black holes optimized for both black hole production and intelligent life
• The life-black hole-universe cycle happened at a rate dramatically faster than before

Illustrated:

What does this buy us? It allows that intelligent life only has to emerge from “true” spontaneity one time in all of the multiverse. In all universes after that, which have their own big bang, life does generate spontaneously, but the creators knew that it would happen. These creators have a firm grasp on the statistics for life emerging and becoming space faring. They have reduced every factor in the Drake equation to a hard science. So they know very exactly the expected density and time range for civilizations in the universes they create.

The key word different from prior published work is “optimized”. Other works hint on the idea but they often frame civilizations as creating new universes accidentally or incidentally. I had ChatGPT fish me a list of references. If this misses something, then please skewer me for my use of AI.

Literature References

1. Michael E. Price — scientific / theoretical reference
Price, Michael E. “Entropy and Selection: Life as an Adaptation for Universe Replication.” Complexity, 2017, pp. 1–4. DOI: 10.1155/2017/4745379.

This is the best single scientific reference for the idea that life/intelligence may function as an adaptation for universe replication, extending cosmological natural selection beyond black holes alone.

2. Isaac Asimov — literary / mythic reference
Asimov, Isaac. “The Last Question.” Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956. Later collected in Nine Tomorrows and other Asimov collections.

This is the best literary ancestor for the idea that civilization or its machine descendants ultimately culminate in cosmogenesis: intelligence reaches the end of cosmic history and creates the next universe.

Secondary references

• Edward R. Harrison, “The Natural Selection of Universes Containing Intelligent Life”
• Louis Crane, “Possible Implications of the Quantum Theory of Gravity: An Introduction to the Meduso-Anthropic Principle”
• Michael E. Price, “Could Cosmological Natural Selection Assign a Function to Life?”
• Louis Crane / meduso-anthropic principle overview

Causal Disconnection and Altruism

Let’s attack the big gap in the argument. Why would an advanced civilization do this? I’ll point to our own big bang. It was hot. Nothing could survive that physically. So this might prevent sending entities or data forward in the graph, from a parent universe to the child universe. The reverse, moving from the child universe, would probably be “hard like time travel”, only worse. You would have to travel backwards in time in addition to passing passing through the universe generation point the wrong way.

Getting to the point, what are the options for an advanced civilizations. You have already moved to inhabit multiple galaxies. What else is left? What do you do? Do you have any grander purpose? At some point, they might decide that this is the purpose: not endless consumption, but creation. Giving life to new civilizations will allow them some minor form of influence in the form of that civilization, although all the specifics will be up to chance. The parent civilization has the role of physics parameter selection. Assuming they do this many many times, then they can also try multiple parameter sets.

This is planting trees that they will never see grow. They can’t see anything that happens in the baby universe. But if they don’t do this, what do they do with their time and energy? Options are not mutually-exclusive either! Sure they develop Dyson swarms of hedonistic satisfaction. But do you do that with every star system? Doesn’t that feel… a little boring?

Altruism isn’t an invalid answer. Creating a new civilization gives a form of satisfaction of a higher purposes. Values are imparted to that new civilization, even if the only durable part of those values are existence & sentience against nihilism. The alternative to existence is non-existence and that’s not any fun. Human reproduction is a valid microcosm to this, and that still happens, although parent-child interactions are a strong motivator. Even without parent-child interactions, some would still choose to reproduce, and sea turtles already do this!

Lack of information passing is a requirement in a limited context. In this theory, we are almost certainly one of the universes after the original intelligence genesis. If the parent universe could inform their child universe of its heritage, then it would have done so. We do not have any such evidence of this… yet.

Could we find a message from God later? Yes, this isn’t required, but it would be consistent. Forward-pass of a message might be possible. They could write the message in the CMB, or in the laws of physics. But it could be that they don’t because of bandwidth limitations. Okay, let’s get more formal now on contact with parent civilization. Scenarios are:

1. We have not heard from our parent civilization because passing messages is physically impossible
2. We have not heard from our parent civilization because passing messages is hard and would involve compromises in other parameter selections that would be to our detriment
3. We have not heard from our parent civilization because we are not yet advanced enough to discover them

What’s fascinating about (3) is that it could explicitly connect our origin to our purpose. It could even contain instructions for what they suggest to create as additional baby universes. But we must also accept that (1) and (2) are still sufficient to make a final determination as to our origin… or not. So let’s formalize again.

• After we become an advanced space-faring black hole creating civilization, we can absolutely prove we are not the first instance of intelligent life in the universe tree
• After we become an advanced space-faring black hole creating civilization, it is ambiguous whether we are the first

For the real mind-blown moment.. consider that for the first instance of intelligent life, it might be ambiguous case. It might be possible to know that you are not the first, but it would be really really hard to know when you are the first. After all, the first intelligent civilization sees their universal constants fine-tuned for black hole production. Can you distinguish those parameters from those fine-tuned for intelligent life as well as black holes? Maybe, and maybe not.

There’s also the possibility that your parent civilization gave you an ambiguous parameter set just for fun… this feels less altruistic, but the argument for/against it remains unexplored. It also seems to violate the assumption that optimization happens. And if optimized-for-life universes are dramatically more productive, then it stands to reason that the Fermi Paradox logic itself would hold that we are most likely in a universe optimized for life within this framework, possibly by orders-of-magnitude. So I rate this as a weak possibility, but I am still forced to type it out.

The Symbiotic Variant

The theory does not strictly require baby civilization creation to be intentional, but at surface-level this seems more likely. Again, simply due to the optimization argument. You would be able to create dramatically more baby universes with life if that was your intention. Assuming this is an order-of-magnitude difference, then with natural selection in the picture, this easily becomes dominating. Heck, even with a small difference this becomes dominating.

Get Alan Rominger’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

The laws of physics might impose their own constraint which has a hand in all of this process. I need to introduce one real possibility that can not be easily dismissed. We already threw in certain forms of optimization, so let’s add another.

• Black holes are created to optimize for baby universe creation, where those baby universes create lot of black holes
• Black holes are created such that their baby universe(s) create intellect, space-faring life
• Black holes are created within the above constraints, but also maximally optimized for return energy to the parent universe/civilization that is used to maximize the number of black holes they can create

That’s a mouthful! However, it quite simply gives 3 parameters that would be the vector to optimize in a linear programming problem. The figure-of-merit to optimize would be extremely clear, which is the replication rate of the universe. The higher the value, the more that your lineage dominates the tree in the long run.

Even if the advanced civilization had another objective, then that’s another parameter added into the system. Maybe this objective is local to their own universe. There’s a butter versus guns tradeoff, but there’s no incompatibility. Provided that making these new universes registers at all in the civilization’s value system, the argument works.

This gives some better justification to the arguments made in my references, that framed the back hole creation as motivated by need for energy or running particle accelerators for science. I just think it needs to be said formally, anywhere on the spectrum of intentionally works. I still find it absurd that there would be no cognizant recognition of the baby universe possibility by the creators. As we are discussing it right now…

Fermi Resolution, Specifically

This only resolves the Fermi Paradox if it returns a not-insignificant chance of us being born in the present day. For this to be true, we would have to not have quadrillions of people living in the future in our universe.

What if a reproducing universe produces a quadrillion baby universes? Then doesn’t it stand to reason that you are more likely to live in the stone age of the child universe than the post-singularity of the parent universe? Yes… but not more likely that the post-singularity of the child universe. I’m actually unclear if this approach resolves anything.

We can do the simple “what if?” of, what if our own post-singularity existence required less than 1,000,000,000,000 people in order to create these black holes (so our population level remains around 1%). Say that we are altruistic, and sentience isn’t repeated more than that number simply because it’s a waste of energy and our focus has shifted to creation of baby universes. I rate this argument as valid, but it does depend on value judgement of future advanced civilizations, so this is where it gets interesting.

That puts us in a place where the validity of this argument is a battle of values, and we can keep going with that. What if an advanced civilization is hyper-altruistic? It truly optimizes its actions based on what will create the most resultant universes. In the long-run, this universe will out-compete the others, iff it can pass its values onto its child universes. How can you do this if you can only encode a set of physical parameters? How can that dictate anything about the resultant universe?

God as Intervener

Beyond the initial parameter set for the big bang, it’s not fundamentally prohibited to forward-pass messages. After all, it’s a black hole in your own universe, what happens if you throw stuff into it? Unclear, but it’s hard to rule out one-sided message passing from the parent to the child. The parent could tell the child about where they fit into the multi-verse. This would, as a consequence, redirect the child’s behavior… probably to fit further into the mold of a black hole optimizer for more baby universes. How? I have no idea.

Loneliness Required by Optimization

Another idea is to say that the parent only controls the initial parameter set, but tries to use that to affect the outcome of maximum grandchild universes. How might you do this?

What advanced civilization might be more likely to create child universes? Consider, the cosmos could be seeded densely with intelligent life and they will all meet each other. Would this be effective? Perhaps not. They might be more likely to feel fulfilled with events in their own universe, or otherwise, prone to conflict and direct all their efforts to hostile interactions with the other alien species who are highly abundant.

Another weird idea is they might make an incredibly tight great filter so that the experience of those filter events stays with the civilization, and they become more altruistic as a result, leading to more baby universe creation.

Even more relevant to ourselves, the parent civilization might make space-faring life incredibly sparse on purpose so they don’t have contact, and thus, direct more energy to baby universe creation. Now this is a satisfying resolution.

Why I Don’t Believe it Exactly

I believe something of this general vibe is probably the reality. That inter-dimensional civilizations exist wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. That they had a material impact on us being here today, that’s wild and speculative, but still no reason to see it as surprising.

Why not this? It’s too simple and straight-forward. Within the unification of quantum and relativity, I am sure that we are going to have to change our idea of what our universe is to begin with.

Plus, the arrows in the graph of the parent-child universe relationships imply a direction. It’s likely that this isn’t what the game is to begin with, as it is perfectly directional and time-like. What even is time? We are starting with the presumption of a certain multi-verse structure which we have no knowledge of.

My mind still drifts to this idea when I think of the simulation argument.

Why run simulations of reality when you can have the real thing?

This is an argument against the simulation argument, in favor of this super-strong anthropic argument. I’m almost certain that this argument has a point. Why wouldn’t an advanced civilization have the ability to run the real thing? This is why I’m not very convinced that I’m currently living in a simulation.

Completely Unhinged Variations

Again, I’m searching for a weird answer, far beyond what we might have considered. I’ll give one example.

In our world-view here, dead universes evolved by black hole evolution and then life entered the picture. Well, it would be simpler to cut out the first part since it’s not “necessary”. This unhinged butchering of the story might look like:

• First there is chaos
• A Boltzmann Brain is created out of the chaos
• Having direct access to unbounded formal rules (basically a computer with no computation or memory limits) it creates the very concept of a universe
• Intentionally shapes some to create life
• Universes with life repeat the process via black holes

In this, the lifeless universe exists, but is a secondary construct. The main plot-line goes straight to universes with life in them. I’m sure this will have appeal to religious theologians. It also does somewhat better to go to cellular automata fundamentals straight away. Because if you don’t do this, you’re still sitting on the question of how the first lifeless universe was created, which still hangs out, unanswered.

You might object that universe evolution is unnecessary in this scheme. But if some recursive universes existed, and other universes were not, then you would expect higher probability to exist in the recursive one. Anything that’s not an exponential infinity is a rounding error. Assuming infinities exist.

Current Favorite

The Boltzmann Brain is a bridge too far for even me. I think the loneliness-as-optimization is the strongest specific story. This uses a civilization-universe-civilization pattern and gives a population ratio argument that I find to be sufficiently strong for the Fermi Paradox as we know it.

However, I think there are tons of compelling stories within the whole family of universe-evolution-by-advanced-civilization. I am sure there are a ton more interesting ideas under this umbrella that I have not thought of.