Smolin's Cosmological Natural Selection predicts that universes evolve to maximize black hole production. Gough extended this to include intelligent BH production. This workflow asks: if a Kardashev-III civilization can tune BH parameters at collapse, what is the universe reproduction coefficient — and does it exceed the natural stellar rate?
Smolin's CNS proposes that each black hole spawns a child universe with slightly mutated physical constants, and universes with more BH-producing constants are more "fit." The fitness function is total BH production per cosmic lifetime. Our universe is argued to sit near a local maximum of this fitness landscape.
Gough 2011 extended CNS by arguing that sufficiently advanced civilizations (Kardashev III) could produce black holes industrially — at rates far exceeding stellar evolution. If civilizations reach K-III, their contribution to the total BH count per universe could dominate over the natural stellar rate, making intelligence a key selection pressure in CNS.
To actually tune a black hole's parameters at collapse (setting the physical constants of the child universe), a civilization would need to manipulate spacetime at Planck scales — Barrow's Level ω complexity. This requires engineering energy densities near the Planck density ρ_P = c⁵/(Gℏ) ≈ 5 × 10⁹⁶ kg/m³. No known mechanism makes this achievable, even in principle, at Kardashev III.
The reproduction coefficient R is the expected number of fertile child universes produced per parent universe per generation. In natural CNS, R ~ N_BH_total. With civilizational tuning, R_civ = R_nat + N_tuned_total. For natural selection to favor intelligence as a mechanism, we need R_civ > R_nat, i.e., civilizations must produce more fertile BHs than stellar evolution alone.
Computing…