Of all the conspiracy theories, this one wins.
Avi Loeb, bestselling author and former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, has come up with an interesting theory about how our universe came into existence in a lab by an “advanced technological civilization”, which he penned down in Scientific American.
According to Loeb, “Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.” This theory also unifies the religious idea of a creator as told in the origin story with the secular idea of quantum gravity.
Some of the more interesting ideas discussed in the article talk about the civilization classification system. Loeb said that humans are a Class C or a low-level technological civilization that is dependent on its host star. “As of now, we are a low-level technological civilization, graded class C on the cosmic scale, since we are unable to recreate even the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. Even worse, we may be labeled class D since we are carelessly destroying the natural habitat on Earth through climate change, driven by our technologies,” said Loeb.
If there ever comes a time, when we become so technologically advanced that we are independent of the Sun, then we would be upgraded to Class B. And to reach the highest class of civilization, Class A, we would have to be able to create our own tiny universes in a laboratory, just like the theoretical creator that created our universe in the first place.
There are many other things that stand in the way of us reaching a higher civilization class, the biggest hurdle being our inability to create a “large enough density of dark energy within a small region”. If we can get past this challenge, then perhaps one day we may be able to join the creators in class A (which is a long stretch)
