Ask A Genius 1145: Earthly Civilizational Survival and the Set of All Possible Moments
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/10/31
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If earthly civilization survives, is there a principle that the longer a civilization endures, the more it contributes to the universe?
Rick Rosner: If you look at the set of all possible moments in a universe that follows the principles of existence, and there’s no upper limit to the size of a universe, there’s an argument that universes could persist indefinitely. So that’s a whole other concept far into the future. And for a universe to persist, does it need the active participation of conscious beings within it? I find the anthropic principle a bit problematic, which claims that the universe’s conditions are a certain way because otherwise, life wouldn’t have evolved. I don’t love that argument, but there’s another anthropic argument to consider, one that hasn’t been made yet: does order increase in the universe?
The amount of information in a universe generally increases over time. Does order in the universe increase and change in nature? And does this changing order require the participation of increasingly ordered, sophisticated, powerful, intelligent beings within the universe? I don’t know. But it’s possible that a civilization of sufficient power could help a universe persist by manipulating matter on a large scale to prevent massive collapse in parts of the universe—or, at the very least, to escape collapsing regions.
That’s thing one. Thing two, before I get sidetracked, is this: you’d think that with increasing numbers of particles in a universe, the number of possible universes would increase exponentially with the amount of matter or particles. But I wonder—though I don’t know as much about quantum physics as I should- whether that exponential increase or some larger growth is true. Due to quantum entanglement, the number of possible states for universes with a given number of particles may not increase as widely as expected. If quantum entanglement means there’s large-scale indeterminacy, and you’ve got big regions acting like quantum computers or other quantum-entangled systems, maybe these large areas of the universe are like the box containing Schrödinger’s cat, with superimposed states—like alive cat and dead cat.
In a quantum computer, you’ve got a lot of superimposed states, which, if all entangled, could mean a reduction in possible moments for that part of the universe. This overlapping of states may result in fewer unique moments because multiple different moments are combined into one. I don’t know enough quantum physics to tell you if that’s reasonable or not or what the implications are.
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