In his 1995 conference paper "Cosmology as a problem in critical phenomena" Lee Smolin said that several cosmological objects or phenomena, such as spiral galaxies, galaxy formation processes in general, early structure formation, quantum gravity and the large scale structure of the universe might be the result of or have involved certain degree of self-organization. He argues that self-organized systems are often critical systems, with structure spreading out in space and time over every available scale, as shown for example by Per Bak and his collaborators. Therefore, because the distribution of matter in the universe is more or less scale invariant over many orders of magnitude, ideas and strategies developed in the study of self-organized systems could be helpful in tackling certain unsolved problems in cosmology and astrophysics.