Low-tech Intergalactic space-ships from small rocks to comets to whole intact solar systems are being flung out into intergalactic space all the time. There are a trillion estimated “rogue stars” (free-flying stars that have escaped their home galaxy) in the Virgo Cluster alone! What passengers might these space-faring missiles be carrying with them? Image, courtesy of NASA, is a Hubble Space Telescope view of ‘The Mice’ galaxies, 300 million light years away—merging galaxies NGC 4676.
And now, after 27 songs, we come to the subject of Life in the Cosmos.
The staff at Comfortable Universe Headquarters is prepared to make a bold, uncompromising claim and we have a common-sense argument to back it up:
Life is EVERYWHERE!
Exhibit A: Earth 4.2 billion years ago (bya). Recent genetic analysis indicates that the LUCA life form—the “Last Universal Common Ancestor” of all surviving life—lived at that time. That is just a few hundred million years after Earth came into existence.
Could something flick life’s light switch on that fast if it was a rare and uncommon event?
Importantly, LUCA was a surprisingly complex organism. It already had to have a long history of evolution, which suggests that it lived in a diverse microbial community including predatory viruses. LUCA had a cell membrane enclosing its cytoplasm, which included DNA, RNA, and Ribosomes (the tools required to build proteins). Its DNA encoded around 2600 different proteins and included a simple immune system called CRISPR that protects it from invading viruses.
Clearly, LUCA was far from the original simple entity that first crossed the threshold from inorganic blob to living thing.
And it is the crossing of that mysterious threshold that we most want to focus on here in Song 28. Based on the LUCA genetic analysis and on geologic studies of Earth’s early history and on fossil evidence, it had to happen super-fast (by Cosmic and geologic standards). Earth consolidated from the protoplanetary disk about 4.54bya; and there is already evidence for liquid water on Earth by 4.4bya. 200 million years later, you had LUCA.
From habitability (liquid water on a chemically diverse, well-mixed rocky crust) to the first spark of life in somewhere between zero and 200 million years? This is the key basis of our Song of Everything’s common-sense argument that life is everywhere.
After that … after life gets started … perhaps a lot of the habitable planets in the universe run into problems. But once that spark is ignited, we don’t care! Read on for the continuation of the argument.
LUCA’s home—Earth 4.2bya—would seem like a living hell to us. It was under constant heavy bombardment by a rain of large and small meteors, asteroids, and rock fragments that were still roaming the proto-planetary disc. LUCA probably lived in deep, extremely active hydrothermal vents, which were the byproducts of these continuous impacts.
According to latest research, summarized in the 21 January 2026 PBS NOVA episode entitled “Asteroids: Spark of Life,” life may have had its start and actually its ‘heyday’ during that heavy early meteor bombardment in the Hadean Epoch of Earth, when a deep layer of the crust was constantly being seeded with the chemical raw materials for life and churned and stirred by the impacts, creating millions or billions of highly active hydrothermal vents worldwide.
Here’s a Chemistry thought experiment: How many chemical components did the first spark of life require to be gathered and arranged ‘just so’? 100? 1000? How many years of actively mixing these components in a hot soup of nearly boiling water in one single hydrothermal vent are needed to get all these components properly arranged? Can you imagine such a chemical experiment running in a lab for 1000 years? A million years? The famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiment got significant results, and it was run for ONLY ONE WEEK!
Come on! The entire Earth was seething with hydrothermal vents, constantly being blasted by more impacts. We didn’t have just one lone isolated experiment—we had millions or billions of them! And they weren’t running for just seven days but continuously for hundreds and thousands of years! All to just get a handful of chemical components to combine in a fairly straightforward configuration. This is NOT brain surgery! Come on, people! Common sense.
Isn’t it just the most natural, most likely conclusion that the first crude life forms were already living and thriving well before 100 frikkin’ million years? It only took 50 million years to raise the Himalayas from sea level. As these early organisms crossed various simple thresholds of self-preservation and self-replication, they would have taken more and more charge of their own development.
Would you bet against it happening somewhere amid millions to billions of different experiments being run in a planet-wide laboratory with 197 million square miles of floor space, with the various experiments being run non-stop for even just ONE MILLION YEARS? Hell, no! I sure wouldn’t.
How about 100,000 years? (With the first Lab techs not even able to write—their notebooks being crude images drawn on cave walls?) Still probably a safe bet.
Life in its simplest single-cell form is just not that special. You could think of it as just a little more complicated version of fire.
But … “Intelligent” life? Human beings? That’s a whole different story.
Earth 4.2bya was not a place that could have evolved intelligent life as we understand it; and, as we said earlier, this Song 28 just doesn’t care about that.
Forget about the vaunted Drake Equation and the speculations regarding the Fermi Paradox. (Where are all our cognitive, symbolic-reasoning, technological neighbors? Are we really the only ones?)
Our Comfortable Universe’s adamant claim is that if there is or was a Great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire, it is and/or was run by the simplest of single-cell microbes.
It just makes sense.
On Earth, the appearance of the kind of intelligent life that we’re familiar and comfortable with took more than Four Billion Years, and many, many accidents of evolution. THAT seems to be a huge long-shot by comparison to the simple single-celled organisms who have ruled our planet almost since the beginning.
Those—the simple humble microbes—are far more competent space travelers—far more versatile, adaptable, and hardy than our fragile human bodies.
Now ... about that interstellar travel. We go back to Earth 4.2bya: Some of those constant meteor impacts were spewing rocks back out into space. And riding on/in these rocks were our early extremophile organisms. These natural spaceships would have now been travelling the cosmos for 4 billion years.
Buried deep in a cocoon of solid rock, where our organisms are protected from all radiation, these space-farers, who could be traveling upwards of a few hundred kilometers per second (which is 1/1000th the speed of light and is a conservative estimate for the upper limit for how fast such objects could be flung into space from a collision) will have traveled at least 4 million light years already. That means they could have easily reached the Galaxy Andromeda and its 1 trillion stars by now, not to mention potentially seeding life on every single habitable planet in our entire Milky Way.
Conversely, every one of those billion or more habitable planets across the Milky Way probably had their own Hadean Epoch bombardment and their own chemical experiments going on early in their histories; and, we argue, assuming our Earth is nothing too extraordinary, many or most of those planets may also have spawned life, given how quickly it happened here. The resulting ejected objects would be ubiquitous and should be passing through our solar system regularly.
To date, we know of just three interstellar visitors: 1I/Oumuamua (2017), 2I/Borisov (2019) and the recent 3I/ATLAS that is just now exiting our solar system. But we can only see the big ones. There have probably been MANY smaller ones that have escaped detection.
There are several other ways that Cosmic space probes with our simple microbes could have been launched. On the other end of the size scale from planet-bombarding meteors and rocks, astronomers have discovered a handful of ‘hypervelocity stars’ that have been ejected from the Milky Way, probably by encounters with the super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s center. To date, the fastest of these, S5-HVS1, is traveling at 1,755 km/s (3,930,000 mph), almost 0.6% of the speed of light!
If whole stars, probably accompanied by planetary systems, are known to be traveling at speeds easily capable of reaching other galaxies, then how many smaller objects are out there doing the same thing?
The Crab Nebula, courtesy of NASA/ESA. Remnants of supernova that exploded in 1054AD, sending material traveling outward at 1500 km per second.
There are even more violent events going on, which could yield even faster speeds—from supernovas (such as the Crab Nebula shown above) to galaxy collisions (see the opening image).
In terms of intergalactic space travel, our Universe seems to have it covered, folks.
* * *
Now here’s the practical homework problem for us supposedly intelligent life forms: If we are at all serious about establishing an interstellar space program, BY FAR the cheapest, most efficient and most technologically feasible way available for us to get started TODAY is to organize a systematic “search and intercept” system for any interstellar objects that visit our own solar system.
Imagine if Charles Darwin could have collected his samples of species from around the world by simply deploying a big net outside his office rather than embarking on the expensive and time-consuming multi-year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.
The long-established practice of collecting light arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos has already proven its worth many times over. We argue that collecting material samples, and especially drill cores that sample the undisturbed interior, from passing interstellar visitors will also prove to have a huge cost-benefit advantage over those dreamed-of deep space expeditions.
What can we expect to find in samples from the visiting interstellar ‘spaceships’?
We won’t know until we look, of course. Regardless of the discovery of any signatures of life, samples from a variety of interstellar objects will be invaluable in improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of … Everything … from stars and their planetary systems through our galaxy’s structure, and even the universe itself.
Here’s a sampler of some of the surprises we could find: The average interstellar object is likely to be old for two reasons. The first is just because the rock had to travel a long way from some other system to get here. But the second could be far more interesting. The universe has been creating rocks for a long time, and those oldest rocks could tell stories of this ancient history that we cannot see with our telescopes.
Even the astounding new discoveries of distant galaxies that the James Webb Space Telescope is making have their limits. There have been tantalizing hints of galaxies that seem far more mature than our Standard Cosmological Model can explain. But the farther back in time you try to look, the fainter and noisier and more distorted the signal is likely to be.
But if the Standard Model is right in assuming that the structure and evolution of the universe is and was the same everywhere, then the same stuff was happening right here in our backyard, and those early events had to leave behind their calling cards—debris from all the chaotic formation and destruction of generations of big and little objects.
Theory says that the first stars did not and could not produce any rocks directly. The best current theories suggest that these first stars were short lived. Many of them exploded within just a few million years, leaving behind the first heavy elements that could then begin to consolidate into the first rocks. But how fast those first rocks might have formed is entirely unknown. That’s one huge reason why a program to seek out and study the interstellar and intergalactic rocks in our neighborhood could be so important.
What science knows about that first generation of stars (stupidly called Population III stars for historical reasons) is sketchy at best, because they have never been observed—not even one of them. They’re long gone, and so the ones we could see in the distant past are just too far away.
Therefore, the speculation about how these stars behaved is entirely based on theory … and the theory that science is using is not equipped to adequately deal with such small things as individual stars. The Standard Model of Cosmology starts from a sweeping assumption of a homogeneous and isotropic universe—smooth and uniform everywhere you look at all scales. It is therefore silent on the subject of the nature of the little local density fluctuations needed to start individual stars forming.
The Standard Model doesn’t even have a good grip on the much bigger density fluctuations that we have evidence for—the observed 1-in-100,000 fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which we discussed at length in Song 25. Those “210-foot-high hills in a 70-mile-wide landscape” produced our observed galaxies and galaxy clusters; but the way they formed and evolved (in the Standard Model) depends on the unknown structure and unknown behavior of the unknown stuff called Dark Matter (*Cold* Dark Matter is specifically assumed in the Standard Model); so, it’s all just more speculation and guesswork.
Getting our hands on one of those extremely old first rocks and studying them would be like travelling 13 billion light years across the universe and back. Talk about precious!
C’mon, NASA! Get those astronauts on your South-Pole Moon Base to work capturing interstellar objects, please! Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense sending missions to land on a future Oumuamua and collecting samples? It seems at least as productive as sending people all the way to Mars.
Meanwhile, explain why it’s smarter to send human beings to Mars *instead* of bringing back the rock samples already collected by Perseverance. And please send a fleet of robotic missions to search for life on Europa, Titan, Enceladus, etc.
The world is waiting! We are eager to meet our Intergalactic Companions!
You start with nothing, and then you proceed to *take stuff away* …
You’ve got to have the right kind of ‘nothing’ to do that, of course. It’s no abstract ‘Empty Set’ from the world of mathematics. It has fewer rules than that! Clearly, we’re already taking stuff away—we’re on the right track! This form of ‘Nothing’ does not insist on preventing things that don’t exist from sharing its empty realm—every possible kind of nothing is included in its set. That’s a very important philosophical nuance.
Let’s delve even deeper into that strange concept. How can things that don’t exist but aren’t the entirety of the ‘parent nothing’ help us? Be patient. The important idea is that these things are less than their parent nothing. If we focus just on such things, we’ve taken other things away—removed them from consideration.
We now home in on just one such thing that doesn’t exist. For our human mind, which is so dependent on space and time to conceptualize things, we’ll ‘picture’ it as a featureless dot (among an inexhaustible sea of such dots within the parent nothing’s realm). Yet we’ll try to keep in mind that it’s a thing with no size. That doesn’t mean that it’s infinitesimal, because that defines a size—it just doesn’t have the attribute of size at all as expressed on its outside (it naturally ‘presents’ as a piece of nothing within a box of nothing, so to speak) ... but ...
... we can work with that!
In order to build our universe, we (‘~magically~’) assume ourselves to take up residence within this nothing-dot and proceed to *work inward.*
Remember. There are no rules that prevent us from performing such an outrageous act of prestidigitation. We’re starting with nothing. If there was a rule, then it wouldn’t be nothing.
To work inward, we imagine various further subsets that we can define within our chosen dot.
Simple example: Nothing can be divided into an electron and a positron. Science has established that; and many different observations have proven the theory to be correct. They’re called virtual particles, and, as such, they cannot be measured or observed.
The careful thinker might read the previous paragraph and scoff: the virtual particles do not emerge from nothing; they emerge from the electron quantum field.
Here’s how our Song of Everything breaks this down to demonstrate that it indeed emerges from nothing.
First, we presume that any field that has zero value everywhere (no excitations) cannot possibly be distinguished from nothing, or from the absence of such a field. This is the kind of nothing without restrictions on attributes that our construction project story is based on (as opposed to the sterile Empty Set nothing.)
Second, we recognize that the presence of virtual particles means some sort of minimum excitation, which, in our universe, is required by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is a universal phenomenon in our universe, the same everywhere, so that if it has nothing to act on, it cannot be said to be distinguishable from nothing either.
The Uncertainty Principle’s defining parameter, one of the most fundamental in physics, is Planck’s constant, which defines the minimum possible ‘action’ (defined as momentum times distance, or mass times velocity times distance) that an object or entity in today’s universe can have. It is a constant that we argue has to have been tweaked and adjusted through the evolution of universes, and like everything else it has to emerge from nothing gracefully, meaning it, or its antecedent or underlying attributes, have to display Asymptotic Freedom—meaning it relaxes to zero (to nothing) at the smallest scales.
So ... the electron field with zero excitations gets its excitations by interacting with *something* else from the library of nothings held in the Big-V Vacuum—something that behaves like an agitator creating quantum excitations the way that our Qion field does to excite the YYon field (see Song 23 for the discussion of these proto-entities that might have got our universe started). Maybe it’s the same thing. Or maybe the Qion is one of a class of entities that we’re calling ‘Throb.’ Either way, the amplitude of these entities has a potential range from zero (most common) to who-knows-how-big (really rare) which is randomly manifest (like a symmetry breaking) when it interacts with a quantum of the YYon form—in this simple example the Electron Field. The amplitude that got chosen for our universe is what we observe as the fixed value of Planck’s constant.
So back to the (maybe not so simple as it seemed) example: For our construction project, we start with this virtual particle pair (the electron and its anti-particle the positron) that can’t be said to truly exist, and we choose a subset of this nothing. What we choose is only the electron, and only the one with left-handed chirality to its spin, (this strange trick happens to be what our universe chose, and we’ll talk more about that later), and we *reject* or exclude the positron and the right-handed electron (we find clever ways to wall them off, set them aside, or throw them into the back of the closet). These are virtual entities, which are things that don’t exist, and there’s no rule preventing us from picking and choosing among them to be included in our construction project.
The parent nothing has this illimitable sea of such virtual dots (even the concept of counting doesn’t apply), which represent all possible potential ‘internal workspaces’ for attributes and characteristics and all possible rules for interactions among these attributes, yet none of it is actualized—it’s only potential, only possibility until some internally defined construction project self-selects. The individual dots that are elements within the parent set are various limited collections of the potential attributes and rules that could yield a useful construction, but not all of them.
A nothing with potential attributes that can only be expressed internally and have no external source, indeed no external manifestation of any kind whatsoever?
That's what we’re being asked to wrap our brains around. Literally. That’s where we live!
It works (and is philosophically and logically consistent) if you recognize that the full set of attributes have no limitations at all. It’s just an endless pile of pure chaotic garbage, out of which the good and patient scavenger (whose name is Unguided Trial and Error) can pick and choose parts that can be made to work together.
Sigh ... it is just so tough—indeed impossible—to adequately speak of this boundary or threshold or gateway between what-isn’t-but-could-be, and what is. But now we’ve taken yet another shot at trying to speak about it anyhow.
As said, we’re going to take up residence in one chosen dot, so we get to decorate it. We get to say which of the subsets of that dot are going to be ‘keepers’ and which are going to be banished, ignored, quarantined, or ‘put in the back of the closet’. Among the keepers we choose are a field that can manifest space, and another that will actuate time.
Bingo! Right?
Here we have something with reference points that we can sink our teeth into, work with, and talk about, though it’s all only inside that dot we’ve chosen. But inside there … Voila! … Because there are no rules to prevent it, we’ve got ourselves a foundation on which we can build stuff.
Out of nothing? Outrageous!! Ridiculous!!! Radically Twisted!!!! Completely off the Wall, and Downright Certifiably Insane!!!!!
Great. We’re insane, so we need this next step … we carefully, surgically remove all evidence of the ‘cognitive We’ from that ‘picture’. Which dot got chosen and which initial ingredients worked to create space and time are just look-back descriptions we’re borrowing from our particular ‘cognitive We’ perspective in this particular universe. They’re not meaningful in any general sense, and therefore not really useful to the construction project.
That’s because our Song of Everything is, emphatically, NOT an Anthropic argument (Anthropic meaning that we’re only seeing this because a ‘cognizant we’ exists to observe it. See the Wikipedia page on the “Anthropic Principle”).
NAE, lads and lassies! Dinnae fall for ‘at wee trap. This Song 27 is far more subtle and Outrageous than that.
The ‘cognitive we,’ which provides the philosopher’s putative ‘Observer Selection Effect’ is nothing special—it is ill-defined at best. The concept can be extended to become essentially universal to ALL “objects” in any *physical* universe (meaning a universe that allows excitations of its intrinsic [quantum] fields—things that can be interpreted as discrete entities). Such an ‘observer’ needs no cognition or awareness of its experience.
For example, the simple electron qualifies.
It can be any object of any sort that crosses an internally defined (self-defined) threshold such that it can be said (by its interactions with other objects) to have an existence—meaning that it can be described/defined as an entity that can interact meaningfully or usefully with other sub-dots within its one-dot realm in order to build some sort of internally describable structure.
As said, this “observer selection” is effectively *universal.* If it has any usefulness as a philosophical concept, perhaps it is in discussing ‘decoherence’—distinguishing objects from their universal fields. And not everyone would agree that making such a distinction is helpful at all.
Fields interacting with other fields is a process that is happening all over the ‘parent nothing’ realm. It is definitely NOT random (because ‘random’ is a rule for behavior). Rather it ‘results in’ or ‘exhibits as’ an inexhaustible supply of complex connected puzzle pieces (dots with sub-dots with sub-sub-dots, etc.) with self-defined rules linking the sub-dots. Each connection (interaction) is an “observer selection” that qualifies as a bona-fide construction project all by itself.
Outrageous? Yer damn tootin’!
The key point that I’m harping on over and over here is that whatever structure or meaning is produced by the participants can only be seen and defined from the inside—from the participants’ perspective.
In our particular case, there seem to have been a tremendous number of participants (sub-dots) brought into the project, which worked to construct and then reinforce a safe bubble for us, surrounded by a protective buffer, or no-mans-land—a gauntlet of ramparts and bulkheads, alligator-infested moats and razor-wire fences and crenellated battlements that keep out stuff that we don’t need and stuff that would be destructive …
… until what’s left deep down inside of this outrageous self-selected subset of the *nothing of zero size* is our nice relaxed Comfortable Universe.
Easy as pie. Throw it in the oven and bake at 325ยบ for 25 minutes.
This is no joke. This is the astounding, outrageous, paradoxical pathway that leads to a coherent “existence” without requiring any preconditions.
*... deep breath ...*
Your staff here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters has rambled on here for nearly 2000 words—two or three pages (maybe a lot more, depending on your screen) to get to this very basic point.
We’ve talked about it before, too—over and over in various ways—how we got ‘something from nothing’. And we’re going to talk about it again before this Song 27 is over, because it is just so damn important.
* * *
Our Song of Everything’s specific version of the story chooses to start with a simple list of materials that produce what physicists call ‘Inflation’—the earliest event or entity that we have observable clues about.
Here’s a more complete blueprint for our particular Outrageous “impossible” construction project:
First, pick a few ingredients from the “Nothing” (what we’ve been calling the Big-V Vacuum), ignore all others, and create endlessly self-replicating space-time, which is given the name of Inflation by the Cosmology community. We’ve depicted that as our Cosmic Easter Bunny believing that it can “run really fast” and escape the Big-V Vacuum’s destructive mallet in the Cosmic Whac-a-Mole Game (see Songs 17, 22, and 23 for all those details).
As our Easter Bunny desperately runs at lung-busting pace to elude the Cosmic crush of the Big-V Vacuum's mallet, it finds that it is acquiring useful allies from the extensive library within old Big-V. Not everything is trying to destroy it, though the vast majority of things *are*. The trick is to construct a buffer. Here we depict three possible such allies who get recruited, allies that will eventually coalesce into the Strong Nuclear Force and the particles in its domain. Truth and Beauty, Easy and Hard, and Charm and Strange.
Second, start “re-heating”—a ‘phase-change’ or end to Inflation that creates a disorganized ‘junk pile’ of even more building materials. Physicists have dubbed this event “re-heating” because the Standard Model of Cosmology, when projected back in time, implies that there was something extremely hot before Inflation came along. Our Song of Everything says that Inflation itself was the first event, so when the ‘heating’ task gets started, it is virginal, carrying no baggage. I think that’s important, because it is a simplification where there is no justification to add any complications.
Third, start picking up baggage. Sort through the junk pile of building materials and select stuff that builds useful structures. The “re-heating” starts without most of the laws and constants of physics that we’re currently locked into, and without *any* particles as we know them; but as we cross the vast uncharted landscape of the Great Cosmic Desert (see the graph below), eventually what started as pure clean gravity—raw potential energy—gets ‘contaminated.’ At least that’s our Song of Everything’s version of the story.
Constant bombarding by the Chaos of the Big-V Vacuum produces the ‘junk pile’ or, to use another analogy, a bunch of ‘dust-bunnies’ (made of particles and strands of dust and lint) and eventually this stuff settles and coalesces into the first structures. This may not be anything we recognize, but (as we’ve discussed before), because of the Asymptotic Freedom that the Strong Nuclear Force exhibits, the first structures are probably ancestral versions of that—say, for example, colorless proto-quarks and gluons. (We presume that many of the strong force-related attributes, including the three families, color charge, isospin, came in later steps).
How this happens—the steps along the path—nobody knows. As we’ve discussed at length in Song 25, the Great Cosmic Desert covers a colossal range of scales—the equivalent of starting with a single atom and ending up with a Great Blue Whale or a Towering Skyscraper.
We emerge from the Cosmic Desert observing an expanding universe that our current best theory (The Standard Model of Cosmology, also called the Lambda CDM Model) projects backward to an ‘Instanton’ with Planck Energy and Planck Length size. (See the graphs below.)
Now, here is something that is truly outrageous—in the uncomplimentary sense—something that is just plain beyond the pale of common sense.
Consider: The Planck Energy is enough energy to propel me and the sub-compact car I’m driving from here (the Blue Ridge of Central Virginia) to Cleveland—a full tank of gas! Yet this amount of energy is concentrated into an object no bigger than the Planck Length, which is twenty *orders of magnitude* smaller than a single proton! Take a proton and expand it to the size of the observable universe. Then this Instanton thing is supposed to be the size of just one single cell in my body!).
How such a monstrous thing could exist seems to defy credibility. And, indeed, scientists readily acknowledge that this projection of the Standard Model can’t possibly be trusted.
Our Song of Everything takes the position that no fundamental object with anywhere near that much energy ever existed. And we offer a concrete alternative. We propose that such prodigious apparent energy is like the Skyscraper emerging from the Great Cosmic Desert. In its actualization, it was built brick-by-brick through many lost evolutionary steps, each with much smaller energy involved, each of which happened gradually and patiently through a long genealogy—a family tree of universes.
Homing in on that analogy to the Skyscraper: the early universe, when viewed from our present-day vantage point appears as a tower of impossibly high energies because all the details of how it was built have been lost. Our crude particle accelerators smash into the top of the tower and break stuff off, and the pieces appear to free-fall all the way back down to the ‘ground,’ because the patiently evolving laws of physics that built the tower, brick by brick, through generation upon generation of ancestor universes, are utterly lost—out of sight—only present in that “gauntlet of ramparts and bulkheads, alligator-infested moats and razor-wire fences and crenellated battlements” that these ancestor universes have built for us.
Fourth, we emerge from the Great Cosmic Desert when the particles that make up today’s universe appear via a wildly outrageous process that’s called the “Electroweak Phase Transition.” It produced a ‘Left-handed universe’ (WTF?) with outrageous naked particles and forces that have the exact opposite of Asymptotic Freedom—they seem to have more and more energy the closer you study them (requiring yet more mathematical trickery called Renormalization to correctly describe these particles when they’re properly and modestly “dressed” for a life within our Comfortable observable realm.)
Here’s a bit of the flavor of this bizarre construction project: Somewhere along the way through the Great Cosmic Desert, particular fields connected with, and acquired the property called ‘Spin,’ which is just a different, more complicated way than simple velocity for a thing to interact with spacetime. Another property also got acquired, which we know as Electromagnetism.
Significantly, Electromagnetism is the only physical thing that operates at all ranges across spacetime (other than, perhaps gravity—if that is not merely the ‘warp and weft’ of spacetime itself—i.e., the essence and end-product of Inflation).
Working with these two oddly unrelated attributes, in order to build structures that have solidity like tables and chairs and comfy sofas, a bizarre tool had to be plucked from the Big-V toolbox that was effectively a left-handed ‘wrench’ (called a W boson) that only operates on those particles that have left-handed chirality to their spin. The right-handed ones are just ignored!
Who ordered that?
This looks, for all the world, like a cheap gimmick—hardly something that feels fundamental or basic. And yet this is how our universe constructed all of its important structures, from atoms and molecules to stars and planets and Easter Bunnies and nice comfy sofas.
There’s a fun PBS Space-Time video that imparts some of the sense of oddness about these laws of physics, which depend on properties called isospin and hypercharge that we haven’t even mentioned here in our Song of Everything. It’s a little ‘deep’ but if you just sit back and enjoy the ride, it’s a fun immersion into the weird world of Quantum Field Theory.
Physicists have a pretty firm handle on the peculiar and esoteric mathematical gymnastics that govern the Electroweak Phase Transition (the theoretical work didn’t even start until I was in High School in the 1960’s, got a big boost when the W boson was first observed in 1983 after I had started my career at NASA, and wasn’t wrapped up until the Higgs Boson was finally confirmed after I had already retired from NASA in 2012).
With that underpinning, science can pretty well explain everything that seems to be useful to our everyday lives (which, as we’ve pointed out before, is actually pretty insignificant compared to the stuff that is not understood that is lurking out there. It’s a mere 5% of all the stuff the universe is actually made of. Dark matter and dark energy remain totally unexplained), so we won’t cover this in any detail. It’s expertly covered elsewhere.
Here, our Easter Bunny has recruited the help she needs from that master conjurer called Inflation, from the proto-matter guru that came from (re)heating (the apparent hot Big Bang as seen in the background), and from the Higgs and W/Z boson construction workers, ready to get to work. Our exhausted Easter Bunny, having run her heart out to escape the Big-V’s Whac-a-mole mallet, can finally sit back on her sofa and relax for a bit.
The parts of our Song of Everything’s creation story that are agreed upon—that are ‘text-book’ material—are perhaps best summarized by the Wikipedia Page titled “Chronology of the Universe”, which we’ve discussed before.
By contrast, our Comfortable Universe blog posts specialize in extending and expanding the boundaries of known science into unexplored territory. We leave the known and accepted stuff to the vast available published material and boldly venture into the beyond.
Please stay tuned.
* * *
So … Okay … as promised … back to those first impossible statements at the beginning:
Can you really start from Nothing and build something downward and inward?
Well, that really isn’t the key question. The key question is what’s going to stop you?
In order to fully flesh out that paradoxical picture of “taking stuff away from nothing and building inward from that”, we once again go back to the very beginning—the Big-V Vacuum. The wise old sages who wrote the Judeo-Christian Bible weighed in on this. They gave the Big-V another name, which appears in the second verse of the book of Genesis: the “formless Void.”
I’ve lost count of how many different attempts I’ve made to describe this ‘Essential Nothing’ even though I understand that it is intrinsically forever indescribable.
I’ve tried calling it the “quicksand at the foundation of reality”, and the “The Great Empty Everything;” but the best name for it is the oldest—it is the “Tao that cannot be spoken.”
Now … as repetitive as this might seem, we’re going to struggle through that quicksand yet again, on the idea that the more ways one speaks about ‘That which cannot be spoken,’ the better will be our approximation.
Although there are no adequate ways of explaining the inexplicable, every way of approaching it adds value. By exploring as many ways as possible, one comes closer to the ‘core essence’ of what’s ‘hidden behind the veil’—forever just beyond reach, yet, by its manifestations, intimately and centrally underlaying the nature of Everything that can be spoken—Everything for which a Song can be sung.
After all (by our carefully, patiently, sometimes tediously developed argument over these past 26 Songs), this thing that cannot be spoken is at the very core of our origin—it is the very most foundational and important thing to speak about.
This time I’ll start by trying to envision a thing that has no time or space. It’s tough, even for starters. But then you have to add the global idea that this thing has no other reference frame either. It obeys no rules of any kind (except, beautifully paradoxically, the “rule that there are no rules”)—it’s just formless, unbounded, unfathomable, lawless chaos.
What it does have is an unlimited supply of what we’re calling virtual dots, or elements to its set—an illimitable ‘sea’ of them, if you can ‘picture’ a sea that has no time or space. A good way of thinking of these dots is that they’re like ‘ideas.’ They don’t really exist but they sort-of ‘point to’ ways that things could exist.
Ideas! Ahhhhhhh - a light at the end of the tunnel???!
The best ideas are ideas that could be used to make something useful. Most of the dots in this ‘sea’ are just garbage; but since there is no time or space, all the dots touch all other dots, and so useful things are bound to hook up with each other and organize themselves.
These are still just dots, but by their internal organization, they are more sophisticated than the garbage dots, because they’ve cooperated with other dots to construct something useful … like, say, … no less than our whole effing universe!
This is our thought space for the origin of Everything.
What is the usefulness of a ‘sophisticated’ dot lost in an illimitable sea of garbage?
It’s all a matter of perspective.
It is only useful to itself. The value and meaning are entirely relative, defined only within its individual internal perspective.
In that timeless, spaceless ‘sea’, remember, this sophisticated dot is always interacting with all the other dots. Each dot can manifest arbitrary rules and attributes that define the usefulness of other dots to its construction project and can acquire more rules and functions by means of interactions with these other dots, and can, for example, define boundaries and/or limited ranges and/or coupling strengths between them.
Sophisticated dots have sorted and organized themselves such that the garbage dots don’t matter much any more, or are ‘kept in the closet.’ These have pieced together a functional ‘internal life’ defined by the interactions with the selected dots that *are* useful to them. This is the fleshing out of the idea that you start with ‘Nothing’ and ‘take stuff away’ (or put some of it in the closet) in order to build our meaningful reality.
Dots that employ (or acquire) the reference frame we call spacetime can internally refer to this ‘piecing together’ as a sequence of events. But that’s only for its internal reference. Each dot remains just a dot—a ‘block’ with no ‘external’ characteristics at all.
And that is critically important philosophical groundwork. There is no external perspective—there is no ‘God’s Eye’ point of view.
Because of the complete lack of restrictions from without, the really sophisticated dots have constructed a whole realm of sub-dots of their own, entirely internally, with rules that can increasingly (but never absolutely) insulate the realm from the general population of garbage dots and other less useful dots (effectively stowing them on the back shelves in the closet).
The result is the outrageous construction project of which Song 27 sings.
Out there beyond the reference frame of our particular sophisticated dot with its internal ‘sub-dots’, there could be an over-arching hierarchy of dots—dots that encompass ours and other dots such that ours could just be a ‘sub-dot’ to it, etc.
There is no way of identifying or defining a ‘top level’ of dots or of knowing how many layers down from said ‘top’ our universe resides.
Trying to make such a presumption (i.e., by defining a top layer) would imply an abstract absolute. How could such a top layer come into being, and how does one know that it is, in fact at the top?
Such an absolute cannot have any practical meaning, truth or function. Our Song of Everything adamantly insists that no absolutes have any useful relevance to our collectively defined existence.
And so, we’ve come full circle in this latest attempt to explain the intrinsically unexplainable.
* * *
At the end of the day, we settle for this:
There’s a dot in the midst of this madness, and that dot is our universe. Less complex dots in layers above ours can represent precursor universes—ancestor universes—and are reflected in what we perceive as the early development stages of our particular observable universe.
All this stuff at the fringes and beyond represent the bubble-wrap, the packing peanuts, and the shipping crate in which we sit comfortably insulated from the vast, vast majority of all that outrageous madness.
How lucky we are!
-----------------
Back in Song 25, we presented two versions of a graph from a paper in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (please go there for the citation), which does a great job of giving an overview to the entire development and evolution of our universe. It’s called the Triangle of Everything. Here are the two versions of the graph:
The left vertex of the triangle in the upper version, which represents the origin of the universe as described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, is almost certainly wrong, because it comes to a point at a singularity—a point where physical law and mathematical description break down. In the second graph, we’ve offered an alternative view that escapes this problem but replaces it with more than one possible solution. We posit that there are many possible paths that describe our sojourn through precursor and small-scale laws of physics. These seem very unlikely to be unique solutions and are also well-hidden from the probing eyes of science because many of the ‘tracks’ have been erased by subsequent activity.
Note also, more fundamentally, that this graph does not have any natural edges—it could be extended *without limit* both to right and left and up and down off the top and bottom. One could zoom out until the part that is shown appears to be merely an infinitesimal dot. It just happens to be the dot we’re in. What prevents equally useful dots from being anywhere else on the scale? Nothing!
Further: This graph just depicts a space and energy scale. There could be many other scales added, in order to comprehensively describe the realm in which we find ourselves.
These graphs are outrageously busy, and yet everything mentioned in them, in the top graph especially, can be easily searched on the internet. Most of the named items have their own Wikipedia page.
In the bottom graph, we’ve taken the liberty of widening the pathway to our universe by proposing a version of the theory of General Relativity that includes quantum processes and settle toward Asymptotic Freedom at the smallest size scales. There are candidates for such a theory, and we’ve discussed aspects of them at length in Song 19.
The widening depicted along the bottom edge of the ‘Triangle’ is actually very conservative. No stable particle heavier than the proton and neutron exist (labeled ‘p’ and ‘n’ along the Compton Limit line on the graph). It seems very likely that the ‘Construction Zone’ labeled ‘Preheating’ and ‘Building the Mass Gap’ includes all the space to the left of, and curving downward from, those two particles (i.e., a gently curved line extending to the left of ‘p’ and ‘n’ and curving downward through the heart of the ‘dark matter’ ellipse toward the lower left corner of the graph.)
On the upper end of the widened zone, the speculative presence of primordial black holes (for which there is a very extensive Wikipedia page) would also point to a class of even more abundant ‘just a little less dense’ primordial star-forming pockets that we’ve depicted on the graph as ‘Goldilocks pockets of reheating,’ represented by yellow asterisks with red shadowing.
How could you possibly get one without the other?
These rarely discussed entities (which we presume are statistically rare within any given Hubble Radius—i.e., within any observable portion of a universe, which explains why observations haven't confirmed them,) are one of several super-super intriguing hot-spot mechanisms that could have produced stars, heavy elements, and ultimately life at times when the ENTIRE UNIVERSE was in a Goldilocks zone where water was liquid—long before the Standard Model's accepted isotropic, homogeneous Cosmology predicts that the first stars should have formed.
This is a not-so-subtle teaser for an amazing and exciting story that’s upcoming in Song 28!
And that is as good a place as any to end Song 27—leaving the reader in suspense—wanting to read on, right? We hope so. Stay tuned!
The hard-working staff at Comfortable Universe headquarters has been developing a story, called our Song of Everything that starts with an origin story of how our Universe came to be. We’ve rambled some, but basically it has taken 25 Songs to develop the origin story to this point: a picture that our universe started with a very simple Germ Universe with just a few ingredients that emerged from the primordial Vacuum.
Here we summarize the technical details of our specific example. It’s technical, using physics jargon, and yet it is still just a generalized sketch. The story starts with a one-dimensional quantum dipole harmonic oscillator field (excitations of which are colorless proto-gluons or unified proto-quark-gluon amalgams that we’ve dubbed YinYangons or YYons for short, and would be their own anti-particles). This ‘particle/field’ brings ‘proto-space’ or the potentiality for space to the party. In our present-day observed universe, typical Quantum Fields can be viewed as harmonic oscillators, like little springs attached to every point in space, but the YYon field has more heavy lifting to do. It needs to articulate (be able to actualize) the very idea of space itself. Its virtual ‘structure’ carries the potential for two points in a potential one-dimensional space as well as the spring that connects them—a full one-particle universe, so to speak, and yet it is only a potential—not fully physically existing any more than any quantum field exists without an observation.
The action (literally) gets started when we introduce a “Squeezing” proto-time entity that we’re calling a Qion after the Chinese term “Qi,” meaning Vital Energy. The Qion emerges from the Vacuum and, perchance, interacts with the YYon, sending it into excitations. The Qion is a proto-de-Sitter-space-like gravitational field excitation (it is NOT a cosmological-constant-style vacuum energy but a proto-quantum-gravitation field—the first-emerging essentials of General Relativity). It has an anti-particle that is proto-Anti-de-Sitter-like that does not participate in this first interaction. That anti-particle would naturally gravitationally collapse back into nothing—but watch for a discussion later in this post—a later step in our universe’s evolution may have taken advantage of this anti-Qion to initiate the first matter—Dark Matter!)
The “Squeezer” Qion would have had to have enough amplitude (energy) to cross the threshold to initiate what we recognize as Eternal Cosmic Inflation. (Note, however, that this is “proto-physics,” involving just the two fields mentioned, with far simpler precursor laws and different ‘universal constants’ and coupling constants than we have today.)
Even then, that high-energy excitation of the YYon would have only created a tiny fleeting Potential Energy fluctuation (a tiny little “Block Universe” with just a tiny bubble of space-time that wouldn’t be good for much) because of the incessant interference from Vacuum noise. What allowed our big, functional core of nearly flat, homogeneous, and isotropic time and space to establish (along with the required highly non-linear and necessarily approximate and fuzzy shell/edge/boundary—defining that ineffable transition zone between the non-existence of the Big-V Vacuum and a functional internal reference frame for the nascent Germ Universe) was another major statistical outlier—a highly anomalous ‘quiet zone’ within the primordial Vacuum. We call that third ingredient the Vacuon, which evokes the Chinese term “Yuan,” meaning “Origin.”
The above is only a sketch—a story—and probably one of an unlimited class of possibilities. We’ve chosen these ingredients because they fit the clues that we are able to observe within our reference frame and because they seem to be able to seamlessly continue the story through the many steps ahead that would lead to our universe. To wit:
The next step in our story involves the ‘magic’ of self-replication. Using the same established ingredients, the early Universe (our Germ Universe or Mama Easter Bunny) was able to give birth to babies. The ingredients were already built in. The Germ Universe consisted of these two fields only (YYon and Qion), and they had already ‘proven’ they could make a universe (obviously), so the self-replication process would have been pretty much like ‘falling off a log’. The Vacuon had done its job. There was ‘room to play’ here in this new Germ Universe. So, with the occasional strong-enough excitations of the two fields, the Mama would quickly be surrounded by babies.
Of course, in order to start the journey from the simple Germ Universe to the complex real world we observe, the replication process needs to allow mutations. We can identify at least three basic forms that these would take. The first involves simple quantum uncertainty. A parent universe consists of an all-pervasive set of fields representing all of its various components. (We are sure of 17 of them in our observed universe today but posit that there were just two in the original Germ Universe. For future reference, we are also positing that there are probably actually something like 200 fields that have affects in today’s universe.) These universe-wide fields and their interactions fluctuate at each point in space within the parent universe, and so the place where the birth of a Baby Universe is triggered has specific excitation energy-momentum values, not necessarily identical to those that initiated the parent.
The second, more fundamental type of mutations will be caused by fluctuations that lead to small changes of the underlying laws and constants, which can be viewed as the coefficients (strengths) of individual non-linear terms (e.g., the Fourier transform) in the governing equations. In the early two-field Germ Universe, there were only two velocities (the speed at which inflation expanded the bubble of space-time, or the effectively useful flat part of it, as perceived from the internal reference frame of the universe, and the speed of propagation of the energy-momentum excitations, which becomes the speed of light when photons arrived as a later mutation) and so only their relative values had meaning. Matter, and particles in general, would only appear later in the evolutionary journey—a result of mutations of the third kind.
This third kind of mutation introduces new localized fields to the parent universe at locations where babies are generated. These new fields become incorporated into the baby, and therefore become universal in its reference frame. The Big-V Vacuum is always there, lurking, insistently churning, making available its inexhaustible supply of potential ingredients, most of which would be useless or destructive. It is the constant ‘battering’ by the Big-V Vacuum ‘noise’ that is the source of the new fields.
Because of its obvious importance, we take the time, here, to digress and discuss one early addition to the original two Germ Univese fields: Matter. It probably was among the early additions, and based on the preponderance of Dark Matter in our Universe, we argue that Dark Matter is likely to have been the first kind of matter to appear.
We will offer a very loose and crude sketch describing one way that Dark Matter may have ‘materialized,’ if you’ll pardon the pun. We’ve already hinted at it. (It’s pretty technical physics talk and yet only a broad-brush discussion thereof.) The “Balloon” side of the Qion field takes a localized form equivalent to a spacetime with negative vacuum energy, though it is not actually vacuum energy, but a field (and an intrinsically unstable one). However, to the extent that it has properties similar to Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space (the shape of space with negative vacuum energy), perhaps it participates in the well-known correspondence to Conformal Field Theory (CFT) in one less dimension. CFT would apply in conjunction with a physical ‘renormalization’ representing the emergence of mass from massless AdS excitations.
We’re presuming that this anti-Qion exists in one space dimension and one time dimension, which would result in a Conformal Quantum Mechanics with only one dimension (time) and would result in a point object emerging and manifesting gravity.
There is a whole lot of hand-waving here! The AdS2/CFT1 correspondence is very poorly understood, and certainly hasn’t been studied in the context of simple particle physics of a proto-universe. Almost every aspect of such a study is open to exploration and almost none has been explored. As we’ve suggested earlier, there is not likely to be a single unique falsifiable pathway (model) that represents that process. But the key take-away is this: a point object (zero space dimensions) manifesting gravity, probably incapable of interacting with anything else because with no space dimension CFT1 is not associated with a field, sounds a lot like a seriously good candidate for Dark Matter. It’s at least a direction to look if you’re not operating under the constraints of today’s laws of physics but on the assumption that the universe got its start in much simpler functional configurations and then evolved toward the complexity we see.
Okay … in general, this third and most significant form of mutation during universe self-replication brings in new fields from the Big-V Vacuum’s ‘library’. We know that we have three large space dimensions, so the two additional ones would be introduced as needed (there are solid arguments that explain why we have three large space dimensions and not more. The most convincing one is that there are no stable planetary orbits in four dimensions), and we know we have at least 17 quantum fields in today’s universe—one for each of the fundamental particles. We know that the theory is incomplete and so there are probably more. If Inflation and Dark Matter are Qion particle and antiparticle acting on the one-space-dimension YYon, we have two more fields right there—deeper underlying fundamental fields that get us through the Great Cosmic Desert.
We will do a little more speculating on the order that things appeared after we emerged from the Desert, based on their energy levels, with the higher energy level things coming first as the universe expanded and cooled and slow-rolled out of what we call ‘Inflation’. But we’ll save that for later. The main point, here, is that we argue that the new universe-defining fields and attributes appeared one at a time in ‘selection events’ that proved beneficial as universes continued to self-replicate and were subjected to mutations, most of which would be useless or destructive, and so may have resulted in a seriously meandering path from ‘there to here’.
Stepping back and perusing the picture we’re presenting, it is a new, rarely discussed ‘metaparadigm’ in which universes reproduce and mutate following some form of Darwinian Natural Selection. This has been discussed at length in two older posts on this blog: The Firestorm in the Universe post and the USeR Cosmology post. Here, as a reality check, we’ll just present a brief Q&A discussion:
Can universes really have babies? (Our known laws of physics seem to allow it and definitely do not prohibit it. In fact, there are multiple possible ways; but there’s certainly no proof that it happens. Our problem is that the proof is effectively censored from us. Somewhat like the interior of a black hole, the new universe disappears as it is formed—it is unobservable. We’re in a strongly constrained perspective within our universe, and the baby universes would develop their own, entirely separate internal perspectives. Imagine if biologists were trapped inside a single organism, say a human body, and unable to observe any other. What a daunting task it would be for them to figure out the story of biological evolution!)
How does this baby creation work? (We’ve identified at least nine different possible ways. This is the subject of those two older posts on this blog, links provided above. In the discussion below, we’ll be highlighting the two most promising ones—the ones our Song of Everything is “putting its money on,” so to speak.)
Is there sex involved? (Not necessarily, particularly with the early Germ Universes, but it is not ruled out. There could be. One far-out speculation is that universes have ways to interact with each other in the hyper-realm that we call FLAT WORLD (a version of the Multiverse). We introduced Flat World back in Song 21, and hope to elaborate on the ideas further in future Songs. Known examples of such potential interactions include wormholes and colliding multiverse bubbles. A version of the wormhole scenario can be considered analogous to sex. One can imagine that colliding universes with different governing laws might create a ‘hybrid zone’ where the two spacetimes are interacting. This could be chaotic and perhaps usually disastrously destructive, but perhaps—at least in this simple and generic hand-waving thought experiment—occasional hybrids could find ways to ‘shake out’ into a new and useful equilibrium.)
Can the babies inherit the parent universe’s laws of physics? (Yes. The formation of the baby universe within the parent universe, by any of the relevant means described in the USeR Cosmology blog post, begins with ‘stuff’ that is infused with the quantum fields and other properties of the parent universe.)
What is the equivalent of DNA that carries the inheritance information? (Those quantum fields that pervade every bit of the spacetime of the parent universe—two in our model of the Germ Universe, and at least seventeen in our observed universe.)
Is there a mechanism that allows mutation during the reproductive process? (Three ways this can happen were discussed earlier. The intrinsic uncertainty of quantum entities from a localized patch of space in the parent universe as they are transferred to the baby seems to make it almost unavoidable.)
Is Darwinian-style Natural Selection possible with self-replicating universes? (The simplest possibility is that it is just a numbers game. The types of universes that have the most babies statistically dominate the population. But interactions between universes, and perhaps even with an ‘environment’—simpler and/or very distantly related universes within the FLAT WORLD realm—would provide a venue where universes compete with each other on some sort of fitness landscape or landscapes.)
What are these ‘fitness landscapes?’ If Natural Selection is driving universe evolution, what are the competitive or selection pressures that would guide it? (Here is where we stop climbing this ladder of speculation and simply assume we can ‘take a leap’ and not crash. Where we land is on FLAT WORLD, and beyond the clues that modern physics has accumulated that various versions of multiverses seem inevitable, our FLAT WORLD construction is entirely fictional. Our Song of Everything boldly presumes an analogy between universe self-replication and the evolution of life and argues that interaction between universes is involved. Such interactions are embedded within theoretical extensions of our known laws of physics, and, in general, are definitely not ruled out or prohibited; and yet the mechanisms are so far beyond observational verification that the discussion becomes pure fantasy. We stick by the analogy to life and entirely rely on that to move forward. The competitive environments and selection pressures in Darwinian Natural Selection seem nearly unlimited, and new and subtle ones are constantly being discovered, including topics that are called ‘Post-Darwinian’ such as Epigenetics and Niche Construction. Universe evolution may employ a different mix of the available mechanisms than biology does. Who knows?)
Could biological life itself play a role in, or even take charge of, the selection processes that drive universe evolution? (It is conceivable, and if it does, then the analog between universes and biological entities suddenly becomes a robust correspondence—far more concrete and closer to a practical reality. We anchor our biggest-picture thought experiments on this idea, and argue that it is certainly possible, almost guaranteed not to be impossible; and therefore, in a vast quantum-governed multiverse landscape, it will have happened, and probably in closely related ancestor universes. Whether it can be said to have happened in the case of our particular universe or its putative ancestry would be rank speculation. We will be proposing some physical processes by which this can happen within our observable universe or something close to it.
***(Teaser: localized sub-light-cone-sized bubbles—where inflation ended early, perhaps just a few such spots in our entire observable universe (therefore easy to miss)—leading to star formation and heavy element nucleosynthesis far earlier than standard cosmology suggests—during the era when the CMB temperature was between 0ยบ and 100ยบC, making the *Entire Universe* a “Goldilocks” habitable realm—redshift greater than 100, universe barely ten to fifteen million years old!) Look for the elaboration of those ideas in future Songs; but since we don’t yet have any evidence for life anywhere but here on Earth and haven’t observed stars older than several hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the proposed processes cannot rely on much, if any, actual supporting evidence.)***
Could life, therefore, have guided the evolutionary selection of universes toward ones that are especially favorable for life’s existence? (This is the ultimate ‘Fine Tuning’ argument, and it continues to be widely debated in the literature. Our Comfortable Universe approach simply suggests that there is this natural course of events that could, indeed, lead to this universe of ours being favorable to life, and that this seems the least objectionable, most natural way to explain the attributes of the universe that we observe. This is the bottom line of why Universes having babies is such a powerful paradigm.)
Okay. The preceding discussion has blazed one pathway through a virgin thought-space full of HUGE questions that are hugely speculative.
Physicists rarely, if ever, go beyond that first rung of the ladder (Can universes have babies?) and would argue that there is no evidence at all that our one and only observable universe can give birth to babies. Certainly, there’s no evidence that our universe came from a mother universe out there ‘In Back of Beyond’ on the other side of the epoch of Inflation.
However, there are physicists who have used theories of Inflation to explore the possibility of creating a Universe in a test tube. The earliest one may have been from Alan Guth and collaborators—a paper from 1990. That paper is not an open-source document, but Alan Guth also discusses it in his 1997 book “The Inflationary Universe.” This is one of just 13 books that Nobel Laureate Physicist Steven Weinberg included in his all-time list of best Science books for the General Reader.
It deserves that place. Guth’s writing is amazingly meticulous, careful to remain true to the science, not glossing over things, and yet he manages to explain things clearly without using equations. The discussion of the Universe in a test tube work is found in Chapter 16 (pages 253 to 269). For our Song of Everything, the key takeaway from Guth’s discussion is that if or when your universe-creating laboratory is able to reproduce, or get close to energy levels where all the forces and fields appear to converge (which is called the Planck Energy, about 10**19 GeV corresponding to a density of 10**93 grams per cc) then the probability of creating a baby universe is essentially 1—it will happen. By comparison, our entire observable universe today contains only about 10**54 grams.
Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen extend this work in a 2004 paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0410270
), taking it from a Test Tube in the lab of a high-tech advanced civilization to a spontaneous event in normal space in the distant future of our universe. Many of the details of Carroll’s approach go in a different direction from the ‘Universe from nothing’ studies that the paper refers to. It is those papers that more closely relate to our Song of Everything approach. But the 2004 paper lays much of the groundwork for our approach before going into its specific model. The key take-away from that paper for the purposes of the discussion here is that any universe that continues expanding (does not collapse back in on itself) will eventually produce localized fluctuations that initiate Inflation and a baby universe. It happens naturally—no ultra-advanced laboratory full of hyper-intelligent aliens required.
(There is a peer-reviewed companion paper, Carroll and Chen 2005 – PDF at Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0505037 – The published paper is not open source: Carroll, S.M., Chen, J. “Does inflation provide natural initial conditions for the universe?” Gen Relativ Gravit 37, 1671–1674 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-005-0148-2. This is the Essay article with no equations—pretty easy to read.)
But both these ideas—the brute force high-tech approach and the patient late-universe approach— were developed assuming that today’s laws of physics have to apply. Well … how can they not? We sit here immersed in those laws of physics; and we are trying to make a baby. What else do we have to work with?
Well, it’s not the ingredients you work with—it’s the way you use them! The Song of Everything offers the argument that there is a subset of conditions embedded within the laws of our universe that the early Germ Universes took advantage of, and that can generate babies with far less energy in a step-by-step equivalent to fetal development.
This is analogous to saying that the sperm and the egg that initiate a baby human being do not have to already have brains and livers and fingernails fully formed and functioning when the baby is conceived.
What we perceive as a ridiculously high density at the origin point of our universe has little to do, we argue, with the density needed by the first simple Germ Universes in order to produce babies. The difference is the difference between the ‘fetal development’ of our known, highly complex universe, and the ‘evolutionary development’ involving many selection steps between the Germ Universe and ours. This is one of the major examples of how Universe Self-Replication can ease the tension associated with unexplained mysteries of our early universe, and we take that to be a significant bit of evidence in support of the hypothesis.
In the fetal development of a complex organism such as we human beings, we begin with a stem cell, and it divides into two.
If our universe is capable of having babies, then it would have scrupulously maintained that capability to produce an analog to a stem cell. Perhaps it still only takes those two original fields, the YYon and the Qion. This claim remains nothing but wild speculation until those simple stem-cell laws of physics are identified. But maybe there is hope. Those laws ought to be simple, and a ‘stem cell’ produced by our universe would have to be simple and compact relative to its general chaos and complexity. However, there’s a significant caveat: There is no guarantee that the appropriate conditions that these ‘stem-cell-laws’ describe lie within the censorship guard-rails of the observable portion of our universe.
Our example story for the early Germ Universe’s baby-making process began with the YYon interacting with the Qion, which produced a spacetime with the fields of those two entities pervading it, and NO OTHER fields. Those two fields then interacted locally within the spacetime of the parent, and a baby was born in the same manner that the original universe was created out of the Big-V Vacuum, except in this case, the requisite fields were already established.
In the case of a universe with added complexity, more fields have been added during the evolutionary steps that describe the ‘family tree’ of our present universe. Each of those steps could have appeared through processes with relatively reasonable *COMFORTABLE* energy densities, but from our ‘look-back’ perspective within the mature universe, all the steps *seem* to have happened at once, and their energies all get added together into one utterly impossibly large *apparent* energy. This is a heuristic argument, of course, not scientifically rigorous, but it is consistent with all the discoveries of particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, wherein particle colliders with greater and greater energies are employed, and they produce unstable particles that quickly decay into multiple products with lower energies. The structure of the universe does not require stable high-energy particles. The closest we come is the ubiquitous ‘quark-gluon plasma’ that sits confined in the heart of every proton and neutron.
Now, at long last, we come to the teaser presented at the end of Song 25.
ROCKS!
Our highly complex human bodies have evolved a very elaborate way to reproduce. Given a blank slate on which to design a reproduction mechanism for a complex biological organism such as ours, which contains between 200 and 400 different kinds of mature cells, one could imagine thousands of different possible ways reproduction could be achieved. How a highly complex universe would do this is likely to have just as many potential options, so the option we choose is no more than an exercise. We look to one simple example for our design.
As just noted, humans and other complex multi-celled organisms have many different mature cell types that developed out of the initial stem cell. Each type of cell might be thought of as an analogy to one fundamental particle within our Standard Model of Particle Physics, or, more specifically, one quantum field. As mentioned, the total number of such known fields is seventeen. Taking the analogy to complex life forms built from individual cells seriously, we speculate that the number of fields that actually come into play to create a complex universe could be in the hundreds. Whatever the number, each field is required to be represented in the “DNA” of the “stem cell” that gives rise to the baby universe.
Unless we’re missing something (which is possible), all the necessary fields extant in our universe come into play to describe the simple lowly rock.
Imagine a chunk of cold solid matter that got ejected from a planetary system. Imagine that it had enough velocity to even escape the gravitational well of its parent galaxy and its local galaxy cluster. It is just about impossible to argue against this idea that uncountable numbers of such rocks have taken to wandering the vast expanding void of space, and will continue to do so as the universe ages.
With it rides a small package of excitations of every field that constructed the parent universe. Maybe that’s all that’s needed. In the inconceivable expanse of time during which our expanding universe goes through its heat death, the lowly rock just wanders on and on (we’re presuming that protons do not decay but are completely stable).
This simple example, taking its cues from the ‘spirit’ of the Carroll and Chen 2004 paper, declares that, perhaps, if no natural reproductive process happens sooner (i.e., more easily, and it probably can if just YYons and Qions are involved in the presence of the other fields), then we can fall back on excitations nucleated by the rock as it eventually finds itself alone in its own light cone—the last and only entity left in its universe—sort of a default ‘stem cell’ of last resort.
And on it goes—a stable, coherently bound bit of matter at near zero temperature that might be practically eternal in such a setting. (Assumptions about diffusion of individual atoms vs. the rock’s gravitational attraction, and about quantum tunnelling of particles within the rock both need to include a stabilization of the mass balance between incoming and outgoing particles—there might be a ‘Ship of Theseus’ discussion to be had here!)
And so, in the vastness of that sort of time landscape, our simple rock might act over and over as a catalyst and nucleation site, because its localized quantum field structure is highly distorted relative to the immensity of the surrounding empty void of space. Perhaps a significant sized quantum of its mass is required to generate a complex baby universe (i.e., the YYons and Qions might not be sufficient). That seems to be the case in the Universe-in-a-Test-Tube model, for example. In such a case, one could argue that our lowly isolated wandering rocks might be the most essential commodity produced by our universe—its very reason for existence!
How many such rocks exist today, having been ejected into intergalactic space by violent collisions and/or gravitational sling-shotting from its parent star system? A few simple assumptions seem to almost certainly lead to a number far exceeding the number of stars in today’s observable universe.
How many of these rocks give birth to Baby Universes as they patiently wander into their own Hubble Volumes (their own light cones with nothing else inside) and drift on and on through a time scale measured by a count of years where the digits in the number itself just grows and grows without any known limit?
