Universe.php: What If the Cosmos Inherits Like Code?

What if our universe wasn’t some one-off accident, but part of a long chain of "cosmic classes" - each one inheriting, overriding, and testing the constants of its parent?

Imagine the multiverse as a vast codebase, where each universe is a PHP class:

class Universe {
  public float $gravity;
  public float $light_speed;
  public float $entropy_limit;
  public bool $can_sustain_life = false;
  public function __construct(array $constants) {
    $this->gravity = $constants['gravity'] ?? 6.67430e-11;
    $this->light_speed = $constants['light_speed'] ?? 299792458;
    $this->entropy_limit = $constants['entropy_limit'] ?? 1e100;
    $this->can_sustain_life = $this->run_simulation();
  }
  private function run_simulation(): bool {
    // Simulate time, stars, complexity
    return mt_rand(0, 10000) > 9990;
  }
}

Most universes fail. Their constants are too chaotic, too flat, too dark, or too fast. But once in a while, one stumbles onto a working combination — a configuration where atoms form, stars shine, and eventually, someone wonders what PHP is doing in the sky.

Universal Natural Selection

Like evolving code, each new universe could:

• Inherit constants from its parent
• Randomly tweak a few values
• Test the result (can it form matter? run stars? sustain life?)
• Keep the successes, drop the failures

Just like in programming, the buggy builds crash; the clean runs fork new branches.

The Cosmic Git

This view turns the multiverse into a vast version-controlled repo of reality:

• Branches with different values of c or G
• Some universes collapse immediately (exit(1);)
• Others survive, stabilise, and maybe even spawn offspring
• And somewhere along the line… one bootstraps life and reflective consciousness

The Big Bang Was Just a new Universe();

If this sounds wild, it’s because it is. But it's also not that far off from theories like Cosmological Natural Selection, or even String Theory landscapes, which suggest our universe might be just one of countless others - each with different physics.

Maybe what we call "laws of nature" are just default constants. Maybe reality is a sandbox. And maybe... just maybe... the universe is learning to debug itself.