The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!
THE GOLDILOCKS UNIVERSE REVISITED
As noted in an earlier blog, our Universe is a Goldilocks Universe, in as much as the physical parameters that make it up allow life-as-we-know it (such as you and me) to exist. There are three standard explanations why this is so. The first is dumb luck. Even in poker you sometimes get dealt a royal flush or four aces first go! Of course that stretches credibility a tad.
The second is the concept of an intelligent designer – “God” if you will. God created the Universe and the parameters it has because God wanted the Universe to be populated with life forms that would worship He, She or It.
The third is the concept of the Multiverse. There are umpteen zillion universes out there, all natural, all with different physical parameters, some of which will permit the evolution of life-as-we-know-it. It’s therefore not surprising that we exist in such a bio-friendly Universe. If you deal a zillion poker hands, sooner or later you’ll get a royal flush or four aces! Just as it takes probably billions of planets around millions of stars to give a near certain probability that at least one planet will be a Goldilocks planet, so too it probably takes millions to billions of universes to guarantee a Goldilocks universe. Fortunately, there seems to be lots of ways to create universes, or an ultimate Multiverse.
However, I have a fourth suggestion. That is, no matter what the physical parameters of our Universe happened to be, be it akin to a royal flush or one pair or zip, even if such parameters don’t allow for life-as-we-know-it (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen-based), perhaps ‘life’ of another sort (life-not-as-we-know-it) will come to pass. In other words, any Universe will produce life, not only possibly life, but inevitably life. Science fiction is full of life-not-as-we-know-t, from Hoyle’s ‘Black Cloud’ to ‘Star Trek’s’ Horta to Asimov’s ‘Soft Ones’ and Forward’s aliens who live on a neutron star.
Thusly, my suggestion is no matter what the physical parameters of a universe happen to be, ‘life’ will find a way. Each poker hand has an equal chance of being dealt; nearly every possible poker hand is a bio-winner. Nearly every universe is a Goldilocks universe – for something – but that something would be wondering why they lucked out!
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