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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

We're not the lowest-energy possible universe, so if the multiverse does exist we will eventually have baby universes with lower vacuum energy than ours. But since the stability we have is 10^100 special, a baby universe will, at the same time as its edges spread through our universe at near the speed of light, be shrinking how much space is within those edges, and generally not being a nice place to live.

On the bright side, the fact that we're not dead yet seems to indicate that our universe expands faster than it spawns babies, so we should be safe at least until the LHC gets up to full power (joke).

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Thanks for the elaboration Charlie. Sean Carroll seems to think that our place is fertile, i.e., that it will via tunnelling birth baby universes out in its infinite future expanse of exponential expansion. Do you think otherwise, or just consider ours to be much less fertile by comparison?

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