American astrophysicist Avi Loeb attracted public attention
by publishing an article in Scientific American with a bold
hypothesis: What if our universe had been created in a
laboratory? Avi Loeb is an extraordinary person. Head of the
Institute of Theory and Computing, Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, member of the Presidential Council
on Science and Technology. The astrophysicist offered to
look at the riddle of the creation of the world from a new
point of view. Even people far from science know that our
universe was born during the Big Bang. But what came before
that? In the scientific literature, there have been many different
assumptions about the origin of the cosmos. The universe
could have appeared as a result of vacuum fluctuations or due
to the collapse of matter inside a black hole. Or maybe the
expansion and contraction of the universe is cyclical. There is
also an anthropic principle and interesting string theories and
the multiverse hypothesis. Loeb in his article discusses the least
studied of the existing hypotheses about the origin of everything.
Namely, that our universe could have been created in the
laboratory of a technologically advanced civilization.
Due to the fact that our universe has a flat geometry with zero
net energy, an advanced civilization could develop a technology
that would create a daughter universe from nothing through
quantum tunneling. This hypothesis of the origin of the world
combines religious ideas about the creator with secular ideas
about quantum gravity. Loeb suggests that some civilization
may have created the technology for the production of daughter
universes. Such a system resembles a biological one and, like
a biological one, hypothetically allows different generations
of highly developed civilizations to "transfer genetic material"
further.
From this point of view, the author of the article proposes to
evaluate the technological level of civilizations not by how much
energy they consume, as Nikolai Kardashev suggested in 1964.
Instead, Loeb suggests measuring the level of development of
a civilization by its ability to reproduce the astrophysical
conditions that led to the existence of civilization. In 2018,
Earth scientists reproduced the Big Bang in ultracold matter.
On such an assumed cosmic scale, human civilization is
classified as class "C" because we cannot recreate conditions
suitable for life on our planet in the event of the death of our
Sun. A Class B civilization, in turn, can regulate the conditions
in its habitat to be independent of its host star (in our case, the
Sun). A Class A civilization is able to recreate the cosmic
conditions that led to its existence, namely to create a daughter
universe in the laboratory. Thus, Loeb concludes that it is
important for humanity to allow itself to assume that somewhere
in the universe there are civilizations that are much more advanced
than ours. Therefore, although Avi Loeb's ideas do not belong to
the field of pure science, they can serve as a source of inspiration
for further scientific advances.
