Re: The misanthropic universe

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sat May 10 2003 - 20:45:23 MDT

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    Anders wrote:

    > Unless they were very likely to cause the expansion of more
    > domains like that... hey! Quite possibly a good way out of the
    > conundrum of the essay is that such cascades of baby universes are
    > very common, manageing to crowd out the natural expansion-creation
    > cycle that makes most domains miraculous. If the likeliehood of an
    > inhabited domain inducing inflation was higher than the
    > spontaneous fluctuations and the resulting domain also shared this
    > property, then these would rapidly come to dominate the set of
    > worlds. And that would make most worlds non-miraculous!

    I think this still has the same problem. Each such baby universe would
    go through three stages: Big Bang, galactic era, de Sitter expansion.
    The last one goes on forever and every N years it spawns a new set of
    observers due to random fluctuations. So within each baby universe
    the observers during the galactic era, the era which came out of the
    Big Bang just like we did, are infinitely outnumbered by the obserers
    who exist due to random fluctuations during the infinite, de Sitter
    "steady state" expansion.

    As long as the baby universes are enough like our own to go through these
    phases, we still haven't explained why we are in the brief galactic era
    rather than the infinite de Sitter era. The only possibility would be
    that the baby universes have different physics than what ours appears to,
    so that they wouldn't end up in a de Sitter state, and all their observers
    would be in the galactic era. But then you have to explain why we are
    in one of the rare universes that does progress to de Sitter expansion.

    All this is assuming that physicists are right about the future expansion,
    and that the authors of this paper are right that this is a state which
    allows random fluctuations to form stars and planets and observers.

    Hal



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