

An Overdose of Copernicus? Our Universe Might Yet Be Special (2013) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/an-overdose-of-copernicus-our-universe-might-yet-be-special

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Retric
"Not only that, but make tiny changes in even the initial conditions of the
Big Bang and you end up with a sterile universe. Cosmologically speaking, it’s
like we won every lottery every imaginable. From that vantage point we are
special—crazy special."

Assumes life as we know it is the only option. Tweak a few parameters and you
could easily have inelegant life growing up in stars or the 'void' between
galaxy's. Life might operate at timescales billions of times faster or
trillions of times slower etc. But, rarely do such articles consider all the
possible universes we don't inhabit.

PS: There is something of a reverse anthropic principle at work where observed
life adapts to best exploit the physics of it's universe.

~~~
wbhart
The issue isn't that there couldn't be life as we know it. It is that life
wouldn't have had time to evolve, e.g. the universe would disappear in far too
short a time or that the expansion would be so rapid that not even stars and
galaxies would form. In other words, no life of any kind is even conceivably
possible in those universes.

~~~
lomnakkus
If the constants of nature were _completely_ arbitrary you might be right, but
I don't think anyone's suggesting that they necessarily are. Some
(combinations of) constants might represent underlying principles that we just
haven't discovered yet.

The multiverse hypothesis which the article mentions isn't really satisfactory
_intuitively_ , but these days particle physics isn't really in the realm of
intuition _at all_. It does run into the so-called "measurement problem".
(Which may have a hypothesized solution these days for all I know, I'm not
even a layman.)

Personally, I think the question of _entropy_ is more interesting and
fundamental. It's essentially the question "Why did the universe start with
such low entropy?". Sean Carroll has quite a few talks up on "the tubes" about
that question, and I find it fascinating.

EDIT: Sorry about the rambling, not particularly in a state to talk about big
cosmological questions at the moment. Hopefully you'll find it useful
nonetheless.

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moomin
The weak anthropic principle (or, frankly, a simple application of Bayes' law)
observes that, since it would be quite hard to be a living observer in a
lifeless universe, selection bias means that any observable universe you
actually live in will appear to be "fine-tuned".

~~~
vorg
> any observable universe you actually live in will appear to be "fine-tuned"

Who is "you"? Monkey, Mankind, Messiah, Mutant, or Machine? To elaborate...

Monkey: If chimps or even dinosaurs were sufficiently self-aware, then why did
life continue to evolve to humans, and not die off after the first animal
conscious of its surroundings. But if such consciousness isn't enough...

Mankind: Why did humans multiply beyond the first one to ponder about
existence. It seems there might have been only a few thousand humans alive at
some point in time about 100,000 yrs ago, so if the first human to draw
speculations about an after-life on a cave wall lived before then, why didn't
humans go extinct soon after?

Messiah: Or was it a the existence of a single special human at some time in
the past or future who must observe the universe? Or a single instant in the
life of that special human? The instant the Buddha achieved enlightenment, or
any number of other examples which make the weak anthropic principle be a
religious issue not a scientific one. Could certain fine-tunings of the earth
that don't appear related to the evolution of intelligent life, such as the
Sun and Moon having the exact same size when visible from Earth, exist to
contribute to that moment of enlightenment of such a single human?

Mutant: Why does the distribution of the planets in the solar system appear to
be fine-tuned for inter-gallactic space travel? There's only about 10 other
solar objects with gravity comparable to Earth's and hence suitable for long-
term civilization. The Moon has already been walked on, and humans can easily
build large contained cities there using telepresent robots with a 1 second
response time. Then Mars and Mercury with semi-intelligent robots to cater for
the much longer response time, then Jupiter's 4 large moons to provide
humankind with experience of much longer travel times, then a single moon of
Saturn to eliminate any initial choice of target, then the huge gap skipping
Uranus's lack of sizable moons to Neptune's Tritan, and finally the thousands
of years needed to terraform Venus. By then humankind will have trained up,
apparently serendipitously, for inter-gallactic travel. Perhaps some evolved
version of super-intelligent humans will experience some future version of
consciousness we present day humans can't conceive of and the Universe is
actually fine-tuned for them.

Machine: Or perhaps humans build the consciousness the Universe is fine-tuned
for.

~~~
vorg
_Since I 've been downvoted instead of replied to, I might as well
continue..._

Perhaps humans will build a silicon-based consciousness on each planet they
colonize. Each planet-based consciousness in the galaxy could then communicate
with one another to build a one-off galactic consciousness by structuring the
gravitons flowing between then star systems, though its light-based speed of
thought would be far slower than that of humans. Ditto for each galaxy humans
eventually reach in the observable Universe, and then the whole Universe. This
Universal Consciousness based on gravity then "begins" to reach back in time
(using a theory of physics we haven't yet worked out enabling gravity to
transcend time) to ensure fine-tunings so one planet in one galaxy 14 billion
yrs after the Big Bang evolves monkeys then humans who then mutate as they
colonize the galaxy and build silicon-based AI and eventually a single
Universe-wide gravity-based consciousness.

If the Universe continues expanding and never comes to an end, then such a
Universal gravity-based consciousness need never finish being built, it only
needs to be continually being built. If a graviton-based consciousness can
indeed reach back in time, not only would the Universe increase in entropy
over time, but also increase in intelligence. There goes the weak anthropic
principle out the window!

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iamthepieman
just the average of multiple universes wouldn't tell you much without the
standard deviation. The article didn't go into it at all, but do we have any
theories about just how different universes within the multiverse are from
each other? In other words, is there any reason to believe that we are on a
bell curve vs a truly random distribution.

