→ Begin speculation:
Thermodynamic Selection: Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy always increases in a closed system. The consumption of usable energy transforms it into entropy (unusable energy, disorder, chaos).
This would have the consequence that systems and even parts of systems which use energy more efficiently will break down more slowly.
Over time, there would be an overall reduction in usable energy, although what systems or parts of systems remain will be highly efficient relative to the entropy of their surrounds.
In this way, physical and chemical reactions may seem to grow in efficiency and/or complexity and to propogate, even though there is a net increase in entropy for the larger system in which they occur.
Call this process Thermodynamic Selection.
This process makes itself most readily apparent to we mortals in the forms of fire, crystalization, and, of course, biological life.
Thermodynamic Selection also occurs on stellar, galactic, universal, and possibly even multiversal scales. In fact, stars, galaxies, and liveable universes are probably a result of Thermodynamic Selection.
If humans or some other intelligent species manage in the future to create a 2nd Big Bang, then this would help to explain the horrible specificity of the cosmological constant: A universe's laws of physics must allow for the creation of something within that universe, such as intelligent life, that can produce another universe, in order for universes to propogate themselves. This would make the cosmological constant the universe's DNA, and biological life the universe's RNA. Is the universe a bacterium? (metaphor: As Above, So Below) Some sort of self-replicating molecule propogating its way through a primordial sea of virtual universes that will never reproduce? (metaphor: And God [The Universe] walked upon the face of the watery chaos.) Might Dark Matter be some sort of horizontal gene transfer between "cells" of the multiverse?
Alternately, it could be that the sorts of furcating multiverses predicted by some many-worlds interpretations of quantum physics, in which a new universe is spawned per each possible outcome of a given quantum interraction, are the result of a selective process in which only universes that have laws of physics within certain accomodating parameters may reproduce. If protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons can't form, then a universe can't divide. In such a case, the cosmological constant would still be the universe's DNA but the RNA would be baryonic and leptonic matter.
Either way, the propogation of universes and the apparent specificity of the cosmological constant for any given universe are probably an example of Thermodynamic Selection.
.
← End speculation.
