Many Worlds

Central statement

“God is in everything.”

Translation

“The universe itself is a living organism.”

Analysis

A definition of life most people could probably accept would go as follows: something is alive if it has either consciousness or a series of other properties including metastability, the ability to metabolize external substances and/or energy, to respond to stimuli, to procreate, and to adapt to a changing environment, possibly only over the course of more than one generation. The latter set of criteria relies on the presence of an external environment, which would require a universe sized creature to be embedded in a larger multiverse.

Flaws

Given our current knowledge, the possibility of the universe being a primitive organism with a simple order of intelligence is remote. There is no evidence whatsoever for the presence of a metastable, metabolizing, procreating system that would interact with an external multiverse in an adaptive fashion. Nevertheless, its existence cannot be ruled out completely at this point. The situation, however, is different for a being with the kind of advanced intellect required for consciousness. The distribution of matter and energy in the universe is largely consistent with the predictions of the Lambda-CDM model, not with an adaptive system that is responding to external stimuli. In the past, some scientists have suggested that dark matter might be a manifestation of some kind of an external force, but observations of, among others, the bullet cluster do not support such conjectures. If the universe is alive, then we can say with near certainty that despite its vast size, it must be a simple form of life.

In addition, certain parameters of our universe are well established. Among these is the speed at which information travels, namely the speed of light. Exceeding this limitation would require exotic physical phenomena which would be easily observable (wormholes anyone?). Consequently, it would take an intelligent universe sized organism billions of years, possibly more, to form even a single thought. Unless we manage to increase our lifespan by about 10 orders of magnitude, this all but precludes any meaningful interaction between this hypothetical entity and humans. The possibility of such a creature willfully intervening in the lives of individual humans – or even the development of the human race as a whole – is zero. Ironically, the reverse is not necessarily true. If the universe had a mind and if we had access to sufficiently advanced technology, it could very well be possible for us to manipulate that mind from the inside. We would literally be the masters of the universe.