Would there be time for large life to evolve? A galactic-size organism is 100000 lightyears across, so can only act as a coherent organism on timescales of at least 100000 years, probably much more.
To evolve immune defense against small life, there would have be many instances of less-fit large life being killed by small life, to generate the selection pressure. Unless the large-life can reproduce implausibly fast and life on earth is a massively slow-evolving outlier (to make this idea work you probably need thousands or millions of galactic civilisations each built on the ruins of the last, in our past), I don’t see how this can happen.
Another objection: If small life evolves much more quickly than large life, we’d expect small-life galactic civilisations long before any large-life worthy of the name evolved, and could easily technologically outmatch any evolution of a large-life immune system.
If you follow the link, you’ll see an idea from the 1990s, that universes have been selected to produce technological civilizations that produce black holes that produce universes that continue the cycle. (The physical idea is that behind the event horizon, each imploding black hole bounces, and becomes the big bang of a new space-time.) Here selection is purely for fecundity.
I had the notion that a similar cycle might be constructed here—universes selected to produce large life which guides small life to create new universes which continue the cycle—but with anthropic selection favoring such universes as the ones with the most observers in them. The immediate problem is, why wouldn’t unchaperoned universes, in which small life proliferates unchecked, be even more populous?
But I see a way to save the hypothesis. What if the only way to reliably transmit a civilizational imperative into a baby universe, is by seeding it with large life that will adopt the desired values? Perhaps genomes on planets are too far from the big bang to influence directly with any reliability; but perhaps you can do something to the geometry of space which will cause vast dark-matter information-processing systems, forming directly after the big bang, to adopt the imperative of faithful universe replication. Large life would then be a necessary intermediary in the life cycle of the most fecund universes.
That should be setting off huge motivated reasoning alarms.
When it turns out that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass has an alibi, additionally hypothesising that he can teleport (with no evidence) is just heading further down the garden path.
Just as a matter of physics, I’m not fond of these reproducing-universe models. But we are being offered an intellectual choice between “the future of the whole universe depends on what happens on Earth now” and “the whole universe is fake”. So yes, I am motivated to look for a third option, and to keep working on it even if it doesn’t immediately make sense.
You seem to have shifted your original hypothesis quite a bit—originally, the large life killed off the small life before it could make dyson shperes etc. Now, the large life guides the small life to create black holes. So why don’t we see a galaxy that’s been turned into black holes?
I see three possibilities so far: 1) creating the baby universe destroys the parent universe (e.g. finetuning the black hole collapse requires ultra-high-energy processes causing a vacuum decay outside the event horizon); 2) galaxies are organisms and only a few sites function as “germ cells”, the rest of the galactic mass is needed for other functions; 3) there are bounds on the fidelity of large-life heredity (as mediated via this process), producing an inescapable variance in their enthusiasm for replication, and most of the time reproduction is only a secondary imperative.
And yes, I’ve drifted from “cosmic immune system” to “cosmic reproductive cycle”. Perhaps there are other hypotheses, where we are involved with the “cosmic gall bladder” or “cosmic toenail clippings”. :-)
Would there be time for large life to evolve? A galactic-size organism is 100000 lightyears across, so can only act as a coherent organism on timescales of at least 100000 years, probably much more.
To evolve immune defense against small life, there would have be many instances of less-fit large life being killed by small life, to generate the selection pressure. Unless the large-life can reproduce implausibly fast and life on earth is a massively slow-evolving outlier (to make this idea work you probably need thousands or millions of galactic civilisations each built on the ruins of the last, in our past), I don’t see how this can happen.
Another objection: If small life evolves much more quickly than large life, we’d expect small-life galactic civilisations long before any large-life worthy of the name evolved, and could easily technologically outmatch any evolution of a large-life immune system.
If you follow the link, you’ll see an idea from the 1990s, that universes have been selected to produce technological civilizations that produce black holes that produce universes that continue the cycle. (The physical idea is that behind the event horizon, each imploding black hole bounces, and becomes the big bang of a new space-time.) Here selection is purely for fecundity.
I had the notion that a similar cycle might be constructed here—universes selected to produce large life which guides small life to create new universes which continue the cycle—but with anthropic selection favoring such universes as the ones with the most observers in them. The immediate problem is, why wouldn’t unchaperoned universes, in which small life proliferates unchecked, be even more populous?
But I see a way to save the hypothesis. What if the only way to reliably transmit a civilizational imperative into a baby universe, is by seeding it with large life that will adopt the desired values? Perhaps genomes on planets are too far from the big bang to influence directly with any reliability; but perhaps you can do something to the geometry of space which will cause vast dark-matter information-processing systems, forming directly after the big bang, to adopt the imperative of faithful universe replication. Large life would then be a necessary intermediary in the life cycle of the most fecund universes.
That should be setting off huge motivated reasoning alarms.
When it turns out that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass has an alibi, additionally hypothesising that he can teleport (with no evidence) is just heading further down the garden path.
Just as a matter of physics, I’m not fond of these reproducing-universe models. But we are being offered an intellectual choice between “the future of the whole universe depends on what happens on Earth now” and “the whole universe is fake”. So yes, I am motivated to look for a third option, and to keep working on it even if it doesn’t immediately make sense.
You seem to have shifted your original hypothesis quite a bit—originally, the large life killed off the small life before it could make dyson shperes etc. Now, the large life guides the small life to create black holes. So why don’t we see a galaxy that’s been turned into black holes?
I see three possibilities so far: 1) creating the baby universe destroys the parent universe (e.g. finetuning the black hole collapse requires ultra-high-energy processes causing a vacuum decay outside the event horizon); 2) galaxies are organisms and only a few sites function as “germ cells”, the rest of the galactic mass is needed for other functions; 3) there are bounds on the fidelity of large-life heredity (as mediated via this process), producing an inescapable variance in their enthusiasm for replication, and most of the time reproduction is only a secondary imperative.
And yes, I’ve drifted from “cosmic immune system” to “cosmic reproductive cycle”. Perhaps there are other hypotheses, where we are involved with the “cosmic gall bladder” or “cosmic toenail clippings”. :-)
But, we now also have room for other hypotheses.
What if value systems that discourage expansionism also just happen to be the value systems that allow a species to become space faring?