Re: poly: Fermi Paradox and Smolin's selected universes

From: Nick Bostrom <bostrom@ndirect.co.uk>
Date: Sun Nov 08 1998 - 16:29:55 PST

Peter C. McCluskey wrote:

> I recently read Lee Smolin's _The Life of the Cosmos_,
>which describes
> his theory that black holes generate new universes with slightly different
> parameters, which implies that natural selection causes typical universes
> such as ours to have parameters that maximise black hole formation, which
> also happens to be more conducive to the existence of life than many other
> possible universes.
>
> I am wondering whether this reasoning can be extended to address the
> Fermi Paradox by hypothesizing that life capable of solar-scale engineering
> will find matter to be more valuable outside of black holes than inside,
> and significantly reduce the number of black holes produced by universes
> in which they arise. This should imply that natural selection will cause
> the expected number of such civilizations that arise per universe to be
> slightly below 1.

Why just slightly below 1?

Nick Bostrom
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
Received on Mon Nov 9 00:33:31 1998

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