What the question is really asking
'Is the universe conscious?' can mean two very different things. One is a claim about physics: does the cosmos, or its particles, literally have experiences? Physics offers no such evidence, and no measurement that would reveal it. The other is a claim in the philosophy of mind, and there the question is taken seriously by careful thinkers, because our best science has never explained how the felt quality of experience arises from mere matter.
That gap is what motivates the idea. If experience cannot be neatly built out of non-experiencing physical parts, one radical option is that experience was there, in some minimal form, all along.
Panpsychism and cosmopsychism, the serious version
Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a basic, ubiquitous feature of the physical world, present in some rudimentary form even in fundamental particles. Its leading contemporary defender, the philosopher Philip Goff (author of Galileo's Error), argues that physics describes only what matter does, its behavior and relations, and never tells us what matter intrinsically is. Consciousness, on this view, could be that hidden intrinsic nature. Cosmopsychism is a close cousin: rather than building minds up from countless tiny conscious particles, it starts with the universe as a single conscious whole, with our individual minds as aspects of it.
The idea is old, with roots in Spinoza, Leibniz, and William James, and it has drawn renewed attention from philosophers such as Galen Strawson and David Chalmers as a possible response to the hard problem of consciousness. Its appeal is partly economy: instead of consciousness switching on mysteriously at some point in evolution, it is woven into nature from the beginning.
Why many remain skeptical
The objections are substantial. The most famous is the 'combination problem': even if electrons carried specks of experience, it is far from clear how those would add up to a single, unified human mind. Critics also note that panpsychism, as usually stated, makes no distinctive testable predictions, which keeps it in philosophy rather than physics. And it should not be confused with the popular but mistaken claim that quantum mechanics proves the universe is a mind; the physics simply does not say that.
It is worth separating cosmopsychism from cosmology's real findings. The universe is astonishingly structured, and some of its constants look finely balanced for life, a point Goff cites as motivation. But fine-tuning has other candidate explanations, such as a vast multiverse, or the plain observation that living beings could only ever find themselves in a life-permitting universe. None of these require the cosmos to be aware.
Where this stands
The fair summary: there is no scientific evidence that the universe is conscious, and mainstream physics does not claim that it is. Panpsychism and cosmopsychism remain a live, minority philosophical position, valued less as established truth than as a bold attempt to take consciousness seriously as a part of nature rather than an afterthought. Whether they ultimately succeed turns on hard, unresolved problems like combination, which is exactly why the question stays open and interesting.