Accelerating Future

And this is the Rice dwarf virus of the family Reoviridae. The Reoviridae family is a family of viruses that attack the gastrointestinal system. What you see is a computer model built using X-ray crystallography techniques to image the virus atom-by-atom.

What is fascinating is their similarity in appearance. Parallels between objects at such vastly different scales points to the fact that we live in a low-entropy, fractal universe. This allows us to make inferences about new objects using metaphor and metonymy, and actually have a chance that those inferences are correct. If our universe consisted of radically diverse objects, past experience would be far less useful in predicting the future - in fact it would have been difficult for any form of intelligence to emerge.

Contemporary physics theories assert that our observable universe is only a small part of a much larger region called the multiverse. The multiverse is infinite for all practical purposes, and contains universes of every size and with every conceivable set of natural laws, including those with greater or fewer spacetime dimensions.

Most of these universes lack the conditions necessary to foster life - for example, if the strong force in the atomic nucleus were slightly weaker than it is here, stable atoms would be impossible, and all the matter in the universe would be a diffuse fog. But finding ourselves in a universe fine-tuned to support life should be no surprise. After all, how could our species have popped up anywhere else?

Specific complexity requires order. Our universe has orderly natural laws that allow complexity to accrete without the interference of chaos. It even looks like the product of an evolutionary selection process that favors the existence of life.

The multiverse hypothesis comes from quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, everything is a chaotic foam at the lowest level, involving random tunneling effects and principles of uncertainty.

If every universe in the multiverse is part of a huge, randomized quantum manifold (as our evidence suggests), then we should expect disorderly universes to be more common than orderly universes. This “universal majority” is far too chaotic and disorganized to harbor intelligent observers. In the same way that SETI scientists specify a planetary “habitable zone” at a certain distance away from a central star, there is a multiversal “habitable zone” where all conscious beings live.

Think of a cellular automata grid like the Game of Life. The simple, disorganized structures are the first to emerge. For the longest time these are the only structures visible. Then, simple, progressively more organized structures can be seen. Eventually, a self-replicator is able to emerge from the fray - the simplest structure capable of reliably copying its own design. If there is a random component to the self-replication process, then evolution and variation may cause this simple replicator to get more complex over time.

When it comes to universes, structures which apparently can be described by just a few parameters, such as starting mass, dimensions, and fundamental forces, simple is more common. We just can’t see all the simple universes because they are too simple to support life. And of course, by definition, we can receive no information from universes outside our own, even though we know they exist. When it comes to structures built by random processes, simplicity rules.

Move up the complexity ladder for universes, and surely they get rarer. (Unless there is a specific force manufacturing complex universes, which looks extremely unlikely. The underlying mechanism of universe creation is quantum and therefore random.) These complex universes may be rare objectively, but they are not rare to observers, who make them their home. Observers only find themselves within universes past a certain complexity level - that threshold necessary to support the emergence and flourishing of life.

There definitely exist universes more complex than our own, and we have to ask - do they contain life? In a universe with more than four dimensions, the interactions between objects would be so complex that a self-replicator would need to be fundamentally more sophisticated to launch itself, and therefore take much longer to come about by random collisions. These complex universes also must be rarer to begin with, so it seems less likely for any given intelligent observer to find him or herself within one.

This is our anthropic landscape. As typical conscious observers, we should expect to live in a universe that is simple, but not so simple that it can’t contain life. This squares nicely with our observations.

The universe’s fundamental simplicity doesn’t signify that complex forms can’t emerge within it. The human brain is coded by a portion of the genome that has less information content than Microsoft Word, but the self-similar, fractal nature of neural architecture means that an adult brain is many orders of magnitude more complex than the genome that built it.

In the same way, even if the universe in fact contains almost no information, it doesn’t mean that we can’t build things or have experiences within it that look complex to us.

For a little more on anthropics, see my October post on the self-sampling assumption, or George Dvorsky’s post from last month on the topic.