From Philip Welsby
We are told that rogue “bubble” universes could blow us all up (29 March, p 11). There is a more interesting scenario.
Suppose that after any big bang it takes 13.7 billion years before an intelligence develops sufficiently to investigate what happened at its particular big bang, and this intelligence then tries to simulate conditions that constituted the big bang (as we are doing at CERN). Not entirely unpredictably, this risks causing another big bang.
The outermost bits of the previous universe, because of inflation, would have spread beyond the reach of the destructive effect of the following big bang. The result would be continual creation.
This hypothesis offers an explanation of why we might be the most advanced civilisation detectable in our universe, and thus of why we have not been visited by a more advanced one. Any more advanced civilisation would have blown us away.
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Perhaps the pope was right for two reasons when he told Stephen Hawking that we should not investigate the moment of creation. First, we would destroy ourselves. Secondly, if we initiated a new universe in which intelligence could develop, we would by our own destruction become their creator: gods, you might say. What a way to go!
Edinburgh, UK
