Could We Create Artificial Universes?

Creating an artificial universe

0:00We usually imagine the peak of civilization is spreading across the stars, building dice and swarms, moving planets, disassembling gas giants, or reshaping whole galaxies into engines, archives, and habitats. But there's a stranger possibility beyond even that. Creating a universe. Not merely a simulating one, though that is part of the story. Not just making a video game with better graphics, or a virtual world so convincing nobody inside can tell the difference.

0:33I mean the possibility of creating a new realm of existence. A new space-time. A baby cosmos. Perhaps born from a black hole, a wormhole, or an engineered bubble of vacuum. That sounds like mythology, in any way as it is. The idea of a world-spoken, dream, sung, or crafted being is one of humanity's oldest stories. But modern physics has a way of making old stories feel strange again. Black holes might not only be grays from matter.

1:04Inflation might allow tiny regions to grow into vast cosmic interiors. Computation might one day host worlds whose inhabitants look up at simulated stars and wonder whether their reality is real. So today, we are asking a dangerous and fascinating question. Could intelligence eventually create artificial universes? And if we did, what kind would they be? Would they depend on us, like a game running on a server? Would they vanish if our machines shut down, or our universe came to an end?

1:36Or could they become independent, like a child born from a parent, owning its origin to us, but not its continued existence? That distinction may be the key. Some creative worlds are lanterns we must keep lit, others perhaps are candles we use to light another flame, after which it burns beyond our reach. So, grab a drink and a snack, and let's ask whether the final act of engineering is not building inside the universe, but building a universe itself.

Defining an artificial universe

2:05What counts as an artificial universe? The phrase artificial universe can mean a lot of things, and we need to be careful with it, because otherwise we end up treating a computer game, a dream, a black hole, and Genesis as though they were all of the same kind. They are not, but they do share a family resemblance. Each involves a created realm with internal structure, a space of rules, histories, objects, places, and perhaps inhabitants. That realm might be extremely crude, like a hand drawn map of a fantasy kingdom.

2:40It might be interactive, like a video game. It might be physically modeled, like a simulation of a galaxy formation. It might contain conscious beings, which immediately makes the ethical stakes much higher. Or it might be a genuinely new spacetime, a baby universe with its own laws, expansion, history, and future. Nor are we assuming here that the universe is all that is and was and ever will be, a term that like its polar opposite in scale, the indivisible atom, turned out to be a bit premature.

3:11We don't know what, if anything, lies outside the observable universe around us, but the consensus seems to be a lot, a lot, and many theories assume we are not the top layer of reality, too. We can also think of artificial universes as existing on a ladder, and not just which derives from another, but their scale of internal reality. At the bottom is the fictional world, Middle Earth, Star Wars, Warhammer, or any complex fictional setting which is not a physical universe the way ours is, but is a structured reality.

3:43It exists across books, notes, films, game rules, databases, and human memory. A fictional empire can span a billion galaxies on one page, provided none of those galaxies require accounting departments. And then we move up to games in interactive worlds. A modern open world game has terrain, weather, quests, inventories, and characters who react to your actions. But most of it is still illusion and approximation. The mountain in the distance may not have any geology until you approach it.

4:14Your character's inventory does not include a microscope, or if it does, only works in some spots, only shows a small set of random or prepared zoom-ins. Then we get simulations, as simulation is not just a painted backdrop. It has rules that generate outcomes. You define physical rules and initial conditions, then let them evolve. A sufficiently advanced civilization could model biospheres, civilizations, stars, or whole cosmic histories. Then comes the uncomfortable step, simulated minds.

4:45A virtual universe with no conscious inhabitants is a model. A virtual universe with conscious inhabitants is something else, be they visitors or natives. We might debate whether it is truly a universe, but from the inside, maybe all the war there is. Its inhabitants may have childhoods, fears, art, astronomy, philosophy, and eventually their own simulations. At that point, the question is no longer only technical. It becomes mobile. And beyond computation lies the most exotic category.

5:16A physically created universe. Not a world running on circuits or an alternate reality that already naturally existed and we could learn to visit. But a new region of space-time. Maybe it begins a tiny bubble of false vacuum. Maybe it forms through a black hole. Maybe it inflates internally while remaining microscopic or hidden from the outside. Maybe it pinches off entirely, leaving behind no door, no window, and no way to ask how it's doing. This is why scale alone is not enough.

5:47I can invent a fictional universe a trillion light years across easily. So long as it consists of names for whole superclusters only, each represented by a single pixel on a map. You could divide a virtual cosmos a hundred trillion light years wide and accurately simulate it down to the atomic level, if it has only one particle every billion light years. Or if at most it's generated only when observed. And so size is not the same as information content. Nor is information content king, as I would rather have a world that is simulated just over the microscopic scale with reasonable accuracy,

6:23rather than a single room that might be good to the atomic scale. Map size, perceived size, physical size, and informational complexity are different things. Our absorbable universe is about 93 billion light years across. But whether the whole universe is finite or infinite remains unknown. If it is infinite, then bigger than our universe becomes tricky, cause infinity ruins everyone's neat metaphors. But for artificial universes, we can still ask a useful question. How much structure does the created realm actually possess, and what does that structure depend on?

6:58To answer that, we need four words.

Subverses and seedverses

7:00Subverse, seedverse, superverse, and substrate. Subverses, seedverses, superverses, and substrates. To get these ideas straight, we need a few terms. There's no universal terms for these sorts of universes, but here's what we'll use today for consistency. A subverse is a created universe-like realm that remains dependent upon another reality. Sub here means both beneath and subordinate. A seedverse is a universe that begins from another universe, but then becomes independent.

7:33A superverse is the higher or apparent reality relative to either of those. And a substrate is what a created universe exists on, in, or because of. If we create a simulated universe on a computer, that simulation is a subverse. Our universe is its superverse. The hardware is its substrate. That substrate might be silicon chips, optical computers, quantum processors, vacuum tubes, mechanical gears, living neurons, paper, engineered plasma, or some future black hole computer.

8:06The material can vary enormously, but the relationship remains the same. The subverse runs on something. And because it runs on something, it is very vulnerable to that thing. If the server shuts down, time stops. If the storage corrupts, continents vanish. If the operators delete the file, apocalypse arrives without warning. If the apparent universe ends in heat death, vacuum decay, or cosmic collapse, then the subverse probably ends too. Unless someone found a way to preserve the substrate beyond that doom.

8:38That is what makes it a subverse in the strict sense. It's not merely created by apparent reality. It remains subordinate to one. But a seedverse is different. A seedverse may begin in a parent universe. Perhaps a black hole, a false vacuum bubble, a wormhole throat, or some other engineered region of space-time. It may even have an embryonic phase where it depends on conditions in the parent universe. But if it pinches off into its own space-time and no longer needs the parent universe to sustain it, it is not a subverse anymore.

9:08It is an offspring reality. A simulation is a lantern we keep lit. A seedverse is more like a candle lit from another flame, after which it burns beyond our reach. Fictional worlds are even more fragile than simulations. Their substrate is paper, memory, ink, digital files, cultural transmission, and attention. If every copy of a story is destroyed, and every memory of it fades, that world is gone. This is one reason humans preserve books. We are not just saving text.

9:38We are saving worlds. Now, there is a temptation here to say, therefore a subverse is not real. But that is too quick. Money is not unreal because it depends on banks, laws, ledgers, and collective belief. Love and anger are not unreal because they rely on fragile neurons and hormones. A melody is not unreal because it depends on air vibrations or electric signals. A mind is not unreal because it depends on neurons, and perhaps not even if it depend on silicon chips, exotic computation, or a creator deity in a higher reality.

10:13Real things can be substrate dependent. The deeper question is what kind of reality we are talking about, and whether conscious experience can exist on more than one physical foundation. There is an even stranger hint from holography. In some approaches to quantum gravity, a higher dimensional spacetime can be mathematically equivalent to information living on a lower dimensional boundary. That does not mean we can build a tabletop universe by entangling a few cubits and shouting, let there be spacetime, but it does suggest that spacetime itself may be less fundamental than information and entanglement.

10:48If so, the line between simulating a universe and evoking a universe like spacetime from a substrate may be less clean than we instinctively assume. There is also an older version of this idea, long before computers. Many mythologies and religions describe reality as created by speech, thought, dream, song, command, or divine will. The universe is not merely assembled, it is sustained. We should be careful here. A universe sustained by an omnipotent god is not just a simulation with better cloud storage.

11:21Theology is not engineering in a robe. But the comparison is useful because it raises the same structural question. Is our universe independent, or does it require a higher reality to maintain it? If our universe were made by beings in a higher order reality, then their realm would be our superverse. But that alone would not tell us whether we are a subverse, a seedverse, or something else entirely. Creation and dependence are different things. A child is created by parents, but does not vanish when the parents die.

11:53A puppet moves only while the puppeteer acts. A painting remains after the painter dies, though it can decay. A fire can be lit by another fire and then burn on its own. A machine runs only while powered and maintained. So if some higher civilization create our universe, we'd want to know which analogy applies. If we are a simulation, then our universe might fold up if the superverse dies, or if the machine running us is switched off. If we are a divine dream, then the dreamer matters.

12:24If we are a physically spawned baby universe, then perhaps not. Our universe might have originated from another space-time, then pinched off to become independent. In that case, we would not be a subverse at all. We could be a seedverse. This distinction matters because it changes the emotional meaning of artificial universe creation. A subverse gives its maker access and control, but also imposes dependence. A seedverse may give its creation freedom, but at the cost of separation. You might create it, but never visit it, never communicate with it, never guide it,

12:58and never know whether anyone eventually looks up at the stars and wonders where everything came from. The price of keeping your creation close is that it may die with you. The price of setting it free is that you may never see what it become.

Methods for building a cosmos

13:12How to Build a Cosmos The simplest artificial universes are the ones we already build. We create fictional worlds, game worlds, virtual spaces, and scientific simulations. Today, they are crude, but crude is relative. A modern video game would have seemed like sorcery to almost anyone in history. A simulated galaxy can model billions of particles and still be a toy compared to reality, but is not nothing. A future civilization could take this much farther.

13:42A planet-sized computer could host many artificial worlds. A star-enclosing Matryoshka brain, built as nested shells of computation around the sun, could support staggering numbers of simulated environments. A galaxy-sparing civilization might devote entire star systems to computation. If black-world computers or reversible computing become practical, the efficiency could become far beyond anything we use today. But even then, a simulation does not have to model everything. If you are a simulated universe for conscious inhabitants,

14:14you may only need to model what can affect them. Distant galaxies might be approximations until observed in detail. Quantum events might be generated statistically. Empty space might be represented by rules rather than individual stored particles. This is not exactly cheating. Our own universe already works in layers, and I can refer to those as layers of reality without meaning as poetry or hyperbole. There is no sharp wall between the quantum realm, the microscopic realm, the macroscopic world,

14:44planetary scales, and astronomical scales. They blend into one another, with smaller scale physics forming the foundation for larger scale emergent behavior. The higher layers of reality here are backwards for our normal metaphysical thinking. These foundational levels of reality are tiny. We do not solve quantum chromodynamics every time we design a bridge. It is still there, still part of reality, but bridge builders can usually rely on the emergent rules of material science,

15:15structural engineering, and classical mechanics. The deeper layer has not gone away. It has simply been compressed into higher level rules that are good enough for the task at hand. A simulated universe could do something similar. It might not need to calculate every particle everywhere at full resolution all the time. It could operate through layers of approximation. Increasing detail only where events, observers, or interactions require it. And that also reminds us that a subverse and superverse might not always be cleanly separated like two boxes seen side by side.

15:48Their relationship could be layered, emergent, and dependent on ways that are hard to picture from inside either one. So yes, a subverse could be larger than its parent universe in some senses. It could have a larger coordinate map, more apparent galaxies, or more subject to time for its inhabitants. But it cannot contain unlimited, fully specified detail if its substrate is finite. You can simulate a desert by storing rules for sand dunes. You cannot store the exact quantum state of every grain of sand in a trillion galaxies unless your parent universe has enough capacity to represent that.

16:24Unless, of course, it's not a simulation. This brings us to physical, artificial universes, where the question is not whether we can compute a cosmos, or whether space-time can reproduce. One famous possibility involves black holes. In ordinary language, black holes are regions where matter collapses so densely that not even light can escape. In many speculative models though, the inside of a black hole may not simply end in a singularity. Perhaps quantum gravity prevents infinite density, perhaps the collapse bounces, perhaps what looks to us like a black hole could, from another perspective, be the birth of a new expanding region of space-time.

17:04This does not mean a black hole definitely contains a baby universe. It certainly does not mean we know how to climb through one and come out in Narnia wearing a space suit. While the idea is serious enough to appear in real speculative cosmology, because black holes already force us to ask what happens at horizons, singularities, and the limits of space-time. If black holes concede universes, then advanced civilizations might eventually ask whether they can influence that process. Could you create a black hole with chosen properties?

17:35Could those properties affect the child universe's constants, dimensionality, or initial conditions? Could universe making become a form of cosmic reproduction, with universes selected or engineered through their black holes? This idea even appears in Lee Smulderland's notion of cosmological natural selection, where universes that produce more black holes might produce more offspring or baby universes, allow a kind of evolutionary process among cosmic laws. We should also be careful not to imagine a star collapsing and magically producing a full, duplicate cosmos, with galaxies ready to go.

18:11In most versions, the parent black hole would supply some initial conditions, not a finished inventory. Inflation, quantum gravity, or new physics would have to do the heavy lifting, and we do not know whether that actually happens. Another possibility involves wormholes and inflating bubbles. Imagine creating a tiny region of space-time in a high energy state, perhaps a false vacuum, which then undergoes inflation. From the outside it might be microscopic, hidden behind a horizon, or connected by a wormhole throat.

18:42From inside, it might expand into a vast universe. This is the classic, bigger on the inside idea, though sadly less police box and more general relativity. Inflation is powerful because it allows a tiny region to become enormous. In standard cosmology, cosmic inflation is often revoked to explain why our universe appears so smooth and flat on large scales. If a small patch of space can inflate rapidly, then perhaps an artificial process could trigger a new inflating patch.

19:14This is not just science fiction music, either. In the late 20th century, Edward Ferry, Alan Guth, and Jamal Guvin directly asked whether a universe could be created in a laboratory by forming a small bubble of false vacuum. Classically, the bubble does not simply inflate into a new cosmos. It reaches a maximum size and collapses. But they explored whether quantum tunneling could let it pass into a different configuration, when it evolves into a new universe. Later discussions of child universes note that at grand unified theory energy scales, the sea bubble might have a mass on the order of kilograms rather than galaxies,

19:51though packed into conditions so extreme that only a few kilograms is doing a lot of work there. It turns the idea from what if vacuum decay happens into the sharper question. Could a civilization deliberately arrange the conditions for a universe to butt off without consuming its parent? Here we need caution. Trigger a false vacuum bubble is not a causal engineering proposal. Vacuum decay, if it occurred in our own universe in the wrong way, could be catastrophic.

20:21We have a whole episode on that scenario. A bubble of low energy vacuum expanding at near light speed is not something you want showing up in your neighborhood. Some baby universes try to avoid that by having the new universe pinch off or inflate beyond a horizon, rather than expanding destructively through our space-time. But we do not currently know how to make a universe, or if that phrase even corresponds to anything physically possible. Dangerous to run experiments on too, I should think. Still, this shows how different a physical baby universe would be from a computational subverse.

20:55A simulation requires a continuous substrate inside the higher simulating superverse, while a baby universe might require only an origin event. The initial seed may be tiny. The amount of matter we put into it may not correspond straightforwardly to the matter and energy perceived inside after inflation. The bookkeeping is subtle because general relativity, horizons, vacuum energy, and global space-time structure do not behave like ordinary boxes of stuff. You do not necessarily pour a galaxy into a machine and get a galaxy out.

21:26You might arrange conditions for a new space-time to begin, and inflation does the rest, assuming such a process is even possible. And there are even more exotic possibilities. Cosmic strings, brains, extra dimensions, quantum tunneling from nothing, or engineered space-time defects. And as we discussed before in the context of conformal cyclic cosmology, see that episode, some models imagine one cosmic aeon giving way to another. In those cases, an advanced civilization might not make a new universe from scratch so much as try to leave a mark on the next one.

22:02That is less building a house than scratching a note on the wall before the next tenant moves in. Or perhaps signing your name on a planet or glacier you built. And this gives us two very different paths to artificial universes. The computational path says, build a machine powerful enough to contain a world. The cosmological path says, manipulate space-time so the new world can contain itself. One gives us access, control, monitoring, and perhaps responsibility.

22:32The other may give us independence, permanence, and mystery. In the first case, we are caretakers of a subverse. In the second, we may be midwives to a universe we can never enter. We spend a lot of time on SFA asking whether strange ideas from science fiction could actually work. Sometimes, though, it is just as much fun to watch a movie where worrying about whether the science works is very much not the point. Rift Tracks, from the same folks behind Mystery Science Theater 3000, has a huge collection on Nebula, including the newly added Prisoners of the Lost Universe, where an experiment sends our heroes into a parallel universe full of warlords, monsters, and wonderfully dubious science.

23:13You'd also check out recent editions, like The X from Outer Space, and The Magnetic Monster. Nebula is also where every SFIA episode premieres early and ad-free, along with years of my monthly exclusives and collections of Nebula exclusives and extended editions like Space Industry. Use my link or the QR code on screen to get 50% off an annual plan. Just $30 for the whole year.

Moral implications of creation

23:37Can a universe outgrow its maker? If artificial universes are possible, the biggest questions may not be technical, they may be moral. Suppose we create a simulated universe with conscious beings. They live, love, suffer, build civilization, study physics, and eventually wonder whether they were created. What do we owe them? Do we have a duty to keep the universe running, to prevent suffering? Are we permitted to alter their laws, edit their memories, restart their history, or terminate the experiment?

24:11If their world consumes too much energy, is shutting it down murder, maintenance, or something for which we don't even have the right vocabulary? This is where the old language of gods returns, whether we want it to or not. Creating a world full of conscious beings is not like building a clock. It is more like becoming responsible for a civilization that did not ask to exist. If you can pause their time, erase their continents, or adjust their constants, then from their perspective, you're not merely a programmer or someone rebooting or retconning a classic book or film.

24:45Instead, you are a cosmic power with admin privileges, which may be one of the most terrifying phrases in theology. But a physical baby universe changes the ethical picture. If we create a new universe and it becomes independent, we may have no ability to govern it, repair it, or even observe it. We might be responsible for creating the initial conditions, but not for managing every outcome. Assuming there is a temporary connection we can observe and influence, then it resembles parenthood more than programming. Parents bring children into existence, shape their earliest circumstances, and lose control.

25:20The child becomes a person, not a possession. A baby universe may be the ultimate version of that. We may choose the seed conditions, if such choice is possible, but once it pinches off, it becomes its own story. This also has implications for the Fermi Paradox. When we imagine advanced civilizations, we often imagine them expanding outward, colonizing planets, building dice and swarms, turning galaxies into shiny machinery. But perhaps some mature civilizations turn inward instead.

25:50They build simulated worlds, archives, afterlives, experimental civilizations, or baby universes sent beyond any horizon we can observe. If so, the greatest works of advanced civilization might be invisible to us. A simulated subverse would be hidden inside their infrastructure. The seedverse might disconnect from our space-time entirely. From the outside, the achievement might look like a black hole, a burst of radiation, or nothing at all. This does not solve the Fermi Paradox by itself, but it offers an intriguing possibility.

26:23Maybe the final ambition of intelligence is not always to paint its name across the stars. Maybe some civilizations spend their last cosmic ages making new arenas, where existence can continue after their own universe grows cold. And it becomes a much stronger Fermi Paradox explanation if a civilization does not need to colonize a whole galaxy to do it. If a society only needs to become large and powerful enough to initiate one viable seed universe, then the incentive for endless outward expansion may weaken.

26:53A civilization might spread across a few systems, build the necessary infrastructure, launch its offspring cosmos, and then focus its future inward or beyond. Different factions might attempt this in different places and eras, but that still implies a limited interest to low growth rather than eternal expansion through our existing universe. This is especially tempting in a universe facing heat death. If the stars burn out, black holes evaporate, and usable energy becomes scarce, a civilization might ask whether survival inside this universe is the wrong goal.

27:26Perhaps the ultimate escape is not faster ships or better bunkers, but cosmological reproduction. Of course, this may be impossible. The laws of physics may not allow artificial seed verses. Simulated minds may turn out to be impossible, or ethically forbidden, or limited in ways we do not yet understand. The universe may be stubbornly single layered, no subverses below, and no superverses above. But, if the idea is possible, it reframes a civilization.

27:56A Kardashev Type 2 civilization controls a star, a Type 3 civilization controls a galaxy, but a universe making civilization would not merely use energy. It would alter the genealogy of existence. It would become a link in a chain of realities, whether as programmer, parent, gardener, jailer, or myth maker. And, if such chains exist, they must also ask the uncomfortable reverse question. Are we in one?

Could we be in one

28:24Not necessarily a simulation. There's only one possibility. Our universe could be a subverse running on some higher substrate. It could be a divine creation, sustained by a superverse beyond physics. Whether that's genuinely supernatural, given different rules might apply, or simply deific for practical purposes from our perspective. It could be a seedverse born from another cosmos and now fully independent. Or it could be a universe with no parent, no programmer, and no higher layer waiting outside the map. Again, we have no idea what rules apply in the superverse.

28:57Even concepts like energy, entropy, and matter might simply be something in their simulation or creation, not native to their own reality. Do we have evidence for the seedverse possibility? Not really, though it's not in any clean or widely accepted sense. Many physicists, myself included, already regard the Big Bang not as everything from absolute nothing, but as the earliest hot dense state our current evidence lets us describe. That does not prove a parent cosmos, but does leave room for deeper structure behind the curtain.

29:29Dark energy sometimes gets pulled into this discussion, because it tells us that vacuum and expansion of space are stranger than common sense expected. A few speculative models connect dark energy to baby universes, other cosmic branches, or some larger structure beyond space-time. You can even build a useful toy picture by borrowing loosely from the river model of black holes, where space itself behaves as though it is flowing inward through the horizon. In a seedverse scenario, the important idea would not be matter erupting from some central cosmic drain.

30:03If space-time itself is what is being transformed, extended, or reinterpreted, then from inside the seedverse it might look like space stretching everywhere at once, with no center, no edge, and no special place where the universe began. But that is a visualization, not a verdict. Dark energy by itself is not a birth certificate from a parent cosmos. The standard view treats it as a cosmological constant, or perhaps some evolving field or deep feature of our own universe. And while the standard model of cosmology may not survive intact forever, it has been surprisingly robust against a lot of challenges.

30:39So, if our universe is a seedverse, dark energy is not the label on the cradle. It's more like one of the strange vital sides that keeps cosmologists arguing over what kind of patient the universe actually is. We do not know. But the possibility should make us cautious about our assumptions. If we ever create artificial universes, their inhabitants may ask the same questions we do. They may build telescopes, particle accelerators, philosophies, theologies, and simulations of their own.

31:10They may argue over whether the universe is real, created, sustained, abandoned, or free. And they discover signs of us. What would we want them to find? A careless experiment. A game. A prison. A nursery. A gift. That may be the most important question in artificial universe engineering. Not whether we can do it, or what kind of creators we would become if we could. Creating an artificial universe may turn out to be impossible. Or it may be so far beyond us that even a Kardashev Type III civilization would regard it as myth.

31:43But the idea forced us to ask what creation really means. A fictional world is born in imagination. A simulation is born in computation. A subverse lives on a substrate. A seedverse, if such a thing can be made, may be born from our universe and then leave it behind forever. Some creations are lanterns we must keep lit. Others are children we can only launch into the dark. Perhaps the final ambition of intelligence is not merely to survive the universe, colonize it, or understand it,

32:14but to give rise to new realms where history can begin again. And perhaps, somewhere beyond our horizon, that is exactly what someone once did for us.

32:48The Directed by You could only learn to stop performing our legend and there is only a supplementation for the Earth. w It happens in the background so you can only default. But of course, such an frightening world are the only one other planet.