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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

> Some futurist philosophers had extended the idea to explain the emergence of complex life from hot gas and stars. Humans exploit increasingly powerful energy sources, a progression they argued could culminate in artificial black holes. If those black holes spawned new universes, then a cosmos capable of producing technologically advanced life might produce more offspring. The progression from hot gas to stars, life and technology could, they proposed, be a product of cosmic natural selection.

So the meaning of life is to make as many black holes as possible?

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In a crude way, you could say so. Certainly, looked at through a purely evolutionary lens, the meaning of life for universes is (in one respect) to make as many black holes as possible. That maximises reproductive success for the unit of selection that is the universe. But of course, once consciousness enters the picture, things get more complicated. If conscious beings are generating most of the black holes in a universe for energy production (that are, as a side effect, generating child universes elsewhere, outside that parent universe), then the intelligent lifeforms making those black holes are going to feel some moral obligation to the child universes they're generating at the other side of those black holes. And if they have any control over the basic parameters of matter in the child universes, then perhaps they optimise for universes of a particular kind. They might not go for sheer numbers of offspring in the child universes. They might instead try to minimise unnecessary suffering in the child universe. They might not want the universes to generate life at all, because that's quite a moral weight to bear. Or they might want them to be maximally life producing, because life is intrinsically a good thing, from their point of view. It could go a number of ways. But it would certainly be true that a blind evolutionary search of the possibility space, in order to maximise black hole production, is no longer the case.

Should this be reassuring from a "great filter" perspective? It would seem to raise the odds that our species will survive long enough to create black holes

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