Thursday, July 5, 2007

Baby Universes and Space Exploration

A year or so ago I came across a story about Japanese scientists who were planning on making a baby universe (link to news report, link to original paper). And then I remembered this post at Accelerating Future, Space Travel: Not in a Billion Years, and it got me thinking.

Civilization is bound to get a hell of a lot smarter, a hell of a lot faster, over the next few decades. Some of that will come from better human-to-human networking, as the net figures out how to maximize the utility of its human components. A lot of the rest will come from faster, smaller, exponentially more powerful computers. Part of the corollary to that is that problems that look intractable now - in biology, neurology, economics, and in all probability physics - will be solved with ease in the near future. In all likelihood even more fiendishly difficult problems will present themselves, but what sort of technological spinoffs might lie waiting in the problems that have yet to be solved? Those in biology would make life a plastic thing with which we could do what we wished, at every level, engineering it as reliably as we've previously dealt with stone, metal and, well, plastic. The ones in neurology would allow human intelligence to be immeasurably improved, as well as replicated and then improved even more inside computers. But what of those problems that may be solved in physics?

Leonard Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape shows how recent advances in string theory have indicated that there may be a multiverse in which every constituent universe obeys entirely different versions of the same underlying physics. The number of different possible universes is of course quite vast, but they would all lie on a multidimensional mathematical structure Susskind calls the cosmic landscape. Charting this landscape through brute computation would be an enormous undertaking, likely far more difficult than simply completing the human genome. It is not, however, inconceivable that such a map might be made with the kind of supercomputers likely to be in operation two or three decades from now.

A map alone is of no use, but if those early experiments suggested by Sakai et al. are fruitful, and it proves possible to create patches of space-time on different parts of that landscape, it may also prove possible to specify what part of that landscape they're created on. The paper, of course, envisions the baby universe splitting off entirely from ours so quickly that its existence would be undetectable. It would, just like ours, expand forever, just along different directions. But what if there were regions on the landscape where such a separation wouldn't happen? Where stable wormholes into adjacent universes might be found? There needn't be a lot of them. One in a trillion trillion would be a bounty vast beyond imagining.

That's a lot of maybes, of course. Any one of them could prove to be inaccurate. But if they're not, the possibilities are interesting. In fact, they sort of dwarf piddling little things like mastering the intricacies of life and the human brain. Civilization would become a master of space and time, able to create it according to its specifications, along with the matter necessary to populate that universe. What might remain scarce under such a scenario is a fascinating question to contemplate, but one corollary that might be drawn almost immediately is that space would cease to hold any interest whatsoever. This is so certain that it might serve as an ironclad explanation of the Fermi Paradox: any intelligent species reaching a technological singularity would be guaranteed to figure out the technology of universe creation, and with that, it would turn its back on the outside universe and focus on creating all the real estate it wanted.

Indeed, it's even possible that civilization as such might simply disappear into universes better suited to maintaining it, migrating entirely into those with much higher densities of matter and energy (at least as locally defined.) Perhaps, should they be the type to give a damn, they even restore their home-worlds to their pristine state before tunneling through into superior realities, leaving not a trace of their existence behind.

The lost civilizations that are muttered about in new age theories and SF novels might even have gone that way ... but that would be pushing speculation too far.

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