Hi Larry

Interesting paper that, building on Clavelli's previous work on SUSY phase transitions 'leaking' out of high density objects like white dwarfs. A SUSY star should be able to collapse all the way to black hole-dom, which would extend their lifespans immensely. He also suggests that life could survive the phase transition into exact SUSY by being composed of SUSY atoms.

Would be a strange kind of 'afterlife' for the cosmos, to be lit up by stars progressively getting brighter as they collapse, until they either 'wink out' behind an event horizon or blow off mass when the flux density is too high. In the early days after phase transition white dwarf remnants would 'explode' as gamma-ray bursts as they collapsed behind an event horizon. Then all degenerate objects (eg. brown dwarfs) would start slowly heating up and collapsing because they wouldn't be made of fermions anymore with electron pressure to oppose collapse. Fusion would kick in at a certain collapse radius, at a pulsating equilibrium, until the stuff had all burned up - but no element would be stable above SUSY-oxygen so fusion wouldn't proceed too far. However for a Solar mass star Helmholtz contraction alone would last 4.4 trillion years at constant luminosity. Tiny red dwarfs themselves could last 3.5 trillion years, plus a few trillion of 'normal' fusion to the level of SUSY-oxygen. Even a Brown dwarf would collapse, fuse hydrogen, then helium, and the resulting carbon would probably scavenge the last helium to make SUSY-oxygen then undergo Helmholtz collapse beyond its event horizon.

A strange cosmos indeed. But as the stars die in our local broken-SUSY minima perhaps some strange intelligence might set-off the SUSY transition to get a few more trillion years out of the mass of the stars. The new 'gravastar' theories suggest that black-hole interiors are another phase transition forming a new Big Bang in a baby universe. Perhaps an exact SUSY transition is the onset of Cosmic pregnancy, and it's Life's job to trigger it?

Are we Cosmic Sperm?

Adam