A new philosophical paper by Clement Vidal of the Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition group at Vrije University Brussels has been released online. The paper is titled The Ultimate Future of Artficial Life: Towards Artficial Cosmogenesis (PDF format). It offers speculations on the ultimate goal of artificial life simulations, which the author believes will expand to simulate open-ended evolution, including both physical and cultural evolution. He ponders what it would mean if, eventually, the entire Universe could be simulated well enough to find out what happens if we "replay the tape of the Universe" - what would stay the same and what would change if we ran the Universe back and started it over again? He notes that, if life doesn't self-destruct in the meantime, this would eventually become a critical research tool. Why? Because the longest term problem faced by life is the eventual heat-death of the Universe. The author speculates that by overriding Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS) with Cosmological Artifcial Selection (CAS) our descendants may be able to produce a new Universe with more suitable characteristics.