And a Universe was Born:

When I think of baby things, I think of puppies and kittens. I do not think of baby universes born in the death throes of a collapsing star.  When I think of mutations and natural selection, I do not think of applying these concepts to cosmological constants.

But a guy named Lee Smolin thinks about this stuff so much that he decided to write a book about it.

Smolin points out that our universe, according to the Big Bang Theory, started out (maybe) as an infinitely dense… thing. This thing rapidly expanded into the universe we all know and live in.

When certain stars die, they collapse inward on themselves, forming a black hole.

A black hole is a thing so dense that not even light can escape it.

Smolin hypothesized that behind the event horizons of these black holes, the collapsed matter is re-expanding into new, baby universes. AND that these universes could, in time, spawn their own black holes, their own baby universes. Imagine it- Worlds within worlds, branching out across infinite dimensions, with time flowing through them.

This could actually be real.

That alone was enough to give me goose bumps, but what he said next completely blew my mind.

Smolin hypothesized that, like puppies and kittens and more stereotypical babies, infant universes would resemble their parent. They would resemble their parent, but they would not be identical. Tiny, random mutations could accumulate in their “genetic code,” the physical constants and laws that govern the nature of their realities.

Universes with physics that favored the creation of black holes would pass on their information to new generations of universes, and those with unfavorable physics would die childless. I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like a biological process to me.

This brings up a final point. Scientists have never really settled on a definition of “life.” The best anyone’s ever done is something like: To be alive, a thing must have all or most of the characteristics of living things. A few of these characteristics are reproduction, metabolism, homeostasis, and exposure to natural selection.

So, our universe may reproduce itself, and its children may experience a form of natural selection. So, our universe converts energy and matter into other forms of energy and matter needed to maintain itself, which could be a sort of metabolism.  So, as far as we can tell, our universe maintains a stable-ish internal environment, which could be a form of homeostasis.

So, could that mean our universe is, itself, alive?