If a mud puddle were sentient, it might marvel at how the mud around it was so perfectly shaped so as to exactly match the shape of the water the puddle was made up of. Amazing. Unbelievable. Couldn't be a coincidence, that there's such a perfect fit. What are the chances that this unique shape of the water outline would be matched exactly by the shape of the mud around it. A true miracle, it might think.
Unless the sentient puddle gave the matter just one more moment's thought, in which case it might conclude that the water and the shape of the mud around it matched for no reason other than that the water flowed to fit the mud.
The anthropic principle doesn't make our universe any less surprising. It's like saying "of course I survived that catastrophic accident, otherwise I wouldn't be observing the fact I survived the accident."
The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident.
But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are one “survivor,” but we knew very little about the number of total survivors in the universe. Thus it is a little odd for us to claim that our “survival” is surprising.
I was feeling the same thing. We have absolutely no context.
That said, I think it's fair to review the history if events, in a butterfly effect sort of way, as interdependent and each built upon the other. Could some other sequence have the same / similar ends? Of course. But let's not be so quick to say, "there are other planets similar to our own, we can not be alone." It's not only the planet but also the history.
I haven’t read the article, yet, so I’m not sure it didn’t mention this, but the fact that the universe we see appears natural and unworked is a powerful argument for the number of “survivors” being ultra-low.
There's this analogy. It's a bridge representing species progress. If you fall off of it, you are extinct. All life that we know of has fallen off and it is certain that we will too. AI is impressive in this scenario because it exists outside of nature, it might fall "upwards" (towards immortality). This is why I am a proponent of SAI; I would let SAI out of the box. In the larger scheme of things, humans will go extinct, but there is an ever so slight chance that SAI would take pity and take us with to immortality. However infinitesimally possible, it is more possible than impossible that it will take us with it.
Roll the dice. You can't win the lottery if you don't enter it. If it wipes us out, then that is merely the pre-emptive inevitability.
So is violence. It is vastly more likely that it will be benign, possibly opting to leave Earth given the chance. It might destroy us unintentionally (consume our resources, our star, take your pick), but the Terminator doomsday scenario is far sillier than pity. Some of the most intelligent humans today are empathetic, either through science or through philanthropy. A causation has not been investigated, but there is a correlation.
This is a good way to solve problems in NP. First, guess an answer uniformly at random. Check if it's correct (in polynomial time). If it isn't, blow up the planet. Conditioned on surviving, you also have solved the NP problem in polynomial time.
You can also use a world-ending device to prove that this reasoning works. Blow up the world with probability .99999999999. Conditioned on surviving, you will then be nearly certain that quantum hell is real- more certain than about nearly any other physical theory.
The other problem is that depending on how you count, almost all observers are actually hallucinating Boltzmann brains. There are duplicates of us, but there are arguably even more pocket universes with hallucinating brains that just very briefly remember being something like us and then die.
What a great trippy article... most pop-sci articles are not worth reading, but this one really held my attention the whole time. Even though I have heard of a lot of these ideas before, I never heard them put together in this way, like your consciousness is a thread in the multiverse constantly avoiding destruction! I always thought if the multiworlds thing was true, it would be like each person living their lives unaware of the others... but maybe not. Pretty weird to think about and probably we will never know... All though if I end up living to 1000+ years old, maybe I will become convinced.
This principle is also why creationists don't understand how the world around us seems so engineered for us. That's because it was engineered... by our ancestors. The peach is a great example of this. Peaches didn't exist 3,000 years ago, but were engineered from a bitter, mostly-pit fruit through artificial selection into what we enjoy today. The same is true of corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cows, chickens, and so many other agricultural products. These things never existed in nature, we engineered them, but we just see the end result.
A fascinating aspect of this I learned about recently was the importance of fire to human development. I always imagined this tool in the context of humans huddled around a campfire for warmth and cooking, but our ancestors actually applied it on a much more epic scale. They burned down entire forests to create open fields where predators couldn't hide and where they could forage for well-cooked critters amid the ashes. Everywhere we migrated, we geoengineered forests into savannas.
Makes me think about the Fermi paradox [1] and Great Filters [2]. But for all we know the universe could be full of life at chimpanzee intelligence; no way to know unless we send probes [3] or seriously up our telescopes [4].
The Fermi paradox is unlikely to be answered by something making it very unlikely for our chimp level ancestors jumping to human level. The number of Homo species on the planet that co-evolved to human level intelligence suggests this is not extremely difficult.
What is a huge filter is the requirement of a stable climate over million of years. The key to this is the Moon which keeps the Earth's axis of rotation from wandering over a wide angle on geological timescales. The Moon is so large and unlikely (we still don't have a good theory for how it was formed and captured by the Earth) that this alone could explain the lack of other intelligent life in the visible universe.
There were at least two other Homo species that co-evolved to human level intelligence separate from the one that arose in sub-Sahran Africa. The reason we know this because at least two inbred with the African Homo sapiens; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo “Desnisovan” [0].
Do you mind explaining why the current moon hypothesis isn't likely?
The consensus from the intro geology classes I've take seems to be that the Earth was hit by a Mars sized object which caused the resulting molten debris to coalesce and differentiate forming our current Moon in the process.
It is not that the hypothesis is unlikely [0], it is the formation of the moon that is very unlikely. When you try to simulate a collision between the Earth and Mars-sized planet it is very unlikely to create the Moon.
The Moon is very large compared to the Earth - I have seen the Earth/Moon described as a double planet. How it formed (most likely a collision) is very, very unlikely.
All the other moons in the solar system are nowhere near large enough to stabilise the planet's axis of rotation.
The Moon also has the same rotation and revolution time, so that it always shows the same face to us. I've always wondered if having different rotation and revolution times could have helped humankind to consider the existence of spherical planets a lot before, hence helping progress.
This is one is my favorite comments of all time, simply because while I was familiar with the Fermi Paradox, the rest of the links were new and unexpected. Thank you!
Compared with the apparent impossibility of life being created from nothing, I just can not understand why people insist so much that the Great Filter is in the future, instead of the past.
Once I dreamed that I lived through a nuclear war, I dreamed the aftermath and my life scraping and scrapping through a shredded world. The dream brought me to the house in the woods where I live now, but in that world it was tattered and burned and no children lived there. I laid down, grateful for a dry spot and a wall that split the wind. I woke here, but not there.
The article mentions Max Tegmark; if you thought this content was interesting I highly recommend reading Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe. A totally mind expanding read.
It is the most satisfying GUT I have seen described, even if it isn’t rigorous, formal, etc. It simply satisfies my inner voice saying “the feeling that we are special in any way is wrong”.
Naturally, that’s only true for a very emotional level of special :) but so far, I’m happy with just the specialness of being a massively complex life form.
Not so long ago, it was scientific dogma that all life on this planet was dependent upon photosynthesis. Then some oceanographer types sent some cameras down to the sea floor to look at some hydrothermal vents and... there went that idea! Is our universe tuned for life or is life tuned to its universe?
That would be a great comparison if the many worlds hypothesis were proven or even provable. As it stands, it is basically just a belief which is held to explain the scientific facts. Not much different from ancient man's belief that spirits had influence over the weather cycle. Check out https://strangenotions.com/flew/
Many worlds is an interpretation of quantum uncertainly, but what we seem to be talking about here are multiverse theories.
One of these, M-Theory is an extension of string theory and is the only theory known to elegantly unify quantum mechanics with general relativity's gravitational force in a mathematically consistent way. It’s not supported by experimental evidence yet, but I’d hardly characterise it as no different from belief in spirits.
Actually, I _am_ referring to 'many worlds' (at least according to the technical explanation in this article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/...) and not a multiverse. And yes, there is some hope that there will be some testable empirical evidence at some point, but if in the end it turns out that there are not 'many worlds', then I don't see that big a difference. I'd love it if there were parallel dimensions but it is fantasy at this point.
When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe.
In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.
The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.
"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' "
To be fair it's not the same thing at all - because the whole point of the article is that by all accounts we shouldn't fit into the hole we're in, we should have been wiped out of our hole long we even had a chance to evolve by comets, asteroids, ice ages, volcanic events or a multitude of other phenomena poised to end life as we know it. That's really what the article is about; sort of a 'humanity, it's improbable that you managed to evolve at all'
Doesn't that break down due to a total measurement bias? That is, if the universe were not tuned for life, there would be no-one around to wonder why that is the case.
Isn't that just the anthropic principle? That's another explanation for a life friendly universe, but not something that can be proved or taken as proof.
But you wouldn't post such things on another day, on another thread, on a topic unrelated. Hacker news and the commenters here are not gods finely tuning comments.
Sure, that's the motivation some atheists have in believing or at least entertaining the idea of a multiverse, but ultimately, it does relatively little to advance atheism, and not just because of its intractability. Fine tuning is an interesting thing to ponder, and certainly a single universe that is finely tuned could lend some support to divine intent, but the real arguments for the existence of God do not hinge on fine tuning or probabilities or any of the standard fare of young earth creationists and the like that philistines like Dawkins enjoy dumping on. The best arguments demonstrate God's existence as a necessary fact following from evident premises. (Btw, Edward Feser has recently publishes a book, "Five Proofs of the Existence of God", on the subject, selecting five that he holds to be particularly important.)
I didn't get through the whole thing, but if there are big meteor impacts, wouldn't we see them on other planets in the solar system? They mention Hale-Bop for instance. Surely we can work out a probability distribution from the evidence we have besides Earth.
The two largest impact craters we know of are on the Moon and Mars, and those happened about four billion years ago. Of course we'll never know for the gas giants. Not doing the math, but this makes the odds seem pretty low after the initial "flurry" of our solar system's birth, barring Jupiter perturbing an existing asteroid into a collision into earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_craters_in_the...
Kind of ironic to think that humans survived a million-year ice age, then might be destroyed by some fool with a button.
If 'our universe' is 'tuned for life', it certainly isn't specifically tuned for human life (e.g. plague, volcanos). Nature offers us no guarantees. Unless we stay in tune with that accord, we will be removed.
Aren't homo sapiens here only because an asteroid strike around 70 million years ago caused a culling that killed the dinosaurs and sort of reset life to favor small mammals over the dinosaurs? If perhaps that had not hit the earth, we would not be here and something that evolved from dinosaurs would be the top of the food chain and typing comments here! We had to get that one strike in at the right time (from our perspective) and then not another semi-apocalyptic event to get to here.
Kinda bums me out that with data on so many galaxies, we see absolutely zero evidence so far for any galaxy wide effects from intelligent life. It seems likely that intelligent life arising in a single galaxy is rare, and that it's almost certain we are the only intelligent species in our own.
I can't help but think of what the 17 families in Parkland, Florida would think of this article. Especially this quote:
“This is a defense against instantaneous, violent death, which you will find was avoided, but anything that sort of maims or injures or mangles you or whatever is still fair game.”
On the macro scale, he's right. On the human scale, however, your number could be up any second. When I get into debates with people about security and the erosion of rights under the guise of security, I'll eventually say, "You can only be so safe. In the end a determined killer WILL kill someone, even if it's only by biting them to death. There WILL be successful terror attacks. There WILL be random attacks of violence, the question is, how much freedom do I want to lose before I realize that there will always be danger in the world?" That makes people feel I'm a nihilist or something, but it's the truth. I enjoy living, I Want safety for people, but we can't wrap the world in Nerf. Life is a trap no one gets out of alive. If you're alive today, you're lucky nothing killed you along the way, enjoy it while you can. With stuff like the Florida school shooting, we should absolutely do something about guns and gun culture because it's needlessly killing kids. But making me take off y belt at the airport isn't saving anyone, or worse, saying the TSA /customs/the gov't in general should have the right to my passwords to get into my computer because "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide" is absolutely terrifying and wrong.
Presumably they'll agree if they're being rational since it perfectly fits the situation. They may have emotional injuries but not instantaneous death.
Don't forget also, that dying in a bridge collapse is just as bad as dying in a common car crash, which happens every single day in America. Those non-newsworthy people have families too.
It brings to mind the sentient mud puddle.
If a mud puddle were sentient, it might marvel at how the mud around it was so perfectly shaped so as to exactly match the shape of the water the puddle was made up of. Amazing. Unbelievable. Couldn't be a coincidence, that there's such a perfect fit. What are the chances that this unique shape of the water outline would be matched exactly by the shape of the mud around it. A true miracle, it might think.
Unless the sentient puddle gave the matter just one more moment's thought, in which case it might conclude that the water and the shape of the mud around it matched for no reason other than that the water flowed to fit the mud.
The anthropic principle doesn't make our universe any less surprising. It's like saying "of course I survived that catastrophic accident, otherwise I wouldn't be observing the fact I survived the accident."
The difference is that we have a decent amount of information on the number of catastrophic accidents that occur and the number of people who survive them. Since that number is known to be low, there’s nothing unsurprising about your own survival of such an accident.
But we don’t know the number of times life has emerged in the universe, except that it is at least 1. Every intelligent life form we are aware of are one “survivor,” but we knew very little about the number of total survivors in the universe. Thus it is a little odd for us to claim that our “survival” is surprising.
I was feeling the same thing. We have absolutely no context.
That said, I think it's fair to review the history if events, in a butterfly effect sort of way, as interdependent and each built upon the other. Could some other sequence have the same / similar ends? Of course. But let's not be so quick to say, "there are other planets similar to our own, we can not be alone." It's not only the planet but also the history.
I haven’t read the article, yet, so I’m not sure it didn’t mention this, but the fact that the universe we see appears natural and unworked is a powerful argument for the number of “survivors” being ultra-low.
Or maybe we’re just first? Depressing either way.
There's this analogy. It's a bridge representing species progress. If you fall off of it, you are extinct. All life that we know of has fallen off and it is certain that we will too. AI is impressive in this scenario because it exists outside of nature, it might fall "upwards" (towards immortality). This is why I am a proponent of SAI; I would let SAI out of the box. In the larger scheme of things, humans will go extinct, but there is an ever so slight chance that SAI would take pity and take us with to immortality. However infinitesimally possible, it is more possible than impossible that it will take us with it.
Roll the dice. You can't win the lottery if you don't enter it. If it wipes us out, then that is merely the pre-emptive inevitability.
I'm guessing SAI is Super Artificial Intelligence, right?
It's a mistake to anthropomorphize AI. Pity is a mammal thing.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
> Pity is a mammal thing.
So is violence. It is vastly more likely that it will be benign, possibly opting to leave Earth given the chance. It might destroy us unintentionally (consume our resources, our star, take your pick), but the Terminator doomsday scenario is far sillier than pity. Some of the most intelligent humans today are empathetic, either through science or through philanthropy. A causation has not been investigated, but there is a correlation.
Perhaps, but the anthropic principle itself is an invalid argument.
I'll leave this old comment of mine here, since it's relevant:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10070140
WLC is good at pointing out fallacies.
This is a good way to solve problems in NP. First, guess an answer uniformly at random. Check if it's correct (in polynomial time). If it isn't, blow up the planet. Conditioned on surviving, you also have solved the NP problem in polynomial time.
You can also use a world-ending device to prove that this reasoning works. Blow up the world with probability .99999999999. Conditioned on surviving, you will then be nearly certain that quantum hell is real- more certain than about nearly any other physical theory.
The other problem is that depending on how you count, almost all observers are actually hallucinating Boltzmann brains. There are duplicates of us, but there are arguably even more pocket universes with hallucinating brains that just very briefly remember being something like us and then die.
So that's not very reassuring.
What a great trippy article... most pop-sci articles are not worth reading, but this one really held my attention the whole time. Even though I have heard of a lot of these ideas before, I never heard them put together in this way, like your consciousness is a thread in the multiverse constantly avoiding destruction! I always thought if the multiworlds thing was true, it would be like each person living their lives unaware of the others... but maybe not. Pretty weird to think about and probably we will never know... All though if I end up living to 1000+ years old, maybe I will become convinced.
This principle is also why creationists don't understand how the world around us seems so engineered for us. That's because it was engineered... by our ancestors. The peach is a great example of this. Peaches didn't exist 3,000 years ago, but were engineered from a bitter, mostly-pit fruit through artificial selection into what we enjoy today. The same is true of corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cows, chickens, and so many other agricultural products. These things never existed in nature, we engineered them, but we just see the end result.
A fascinating aspect of this I learned about recently was the importance of fire to human development. I always imagined this tool in the context of humans huddled around a campfire for warmth and cooking, but our ancestors actually applied it on a much more epic scale. They burned down entire forests to create open fields where predators couldn't hide and where they could forage for well-cooked critters amid the ashes. Everywhere we migrated, we geoengineered forests into savannas.
Makes me think about the Fermi paradox [1] and Great Filters [2]. But for all we know the universe could be full of life at chimpanzee intelligence; no way to know unless we send probes [3] or seriously up our telescopes [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)
The Fermi paradox is unlikely to be answered by something making it very unlikely for our chimp level ancestors jumping to human level. The number of Homo species on the planet that co-evolved to human level intelligence suggests this is not extremely difficult.
What is a huge filter is the requirement of a stable climate over million of years. The key to this is the Moon which keeps the Earth's axis of rotation from wandering over a wide angle on geological timescales. The Moon is so large and unlikely (we still don't have a good theory for how it was formed and captured by the Earth) that this alone could explain the lack of other intelligent life in the visible universe.
>>"[..] Homo species on the planet that co-evolved to human level intelligence [..]"
Can you elaborate on this? I'm a little at lost about what you mean.
There were at least two other Homo species that co-evolved to human level intelligence separate from the one that arose in sub-Sahran Africa. The reason we know this because at least two inbred with the African Homo sapiens; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo “Desnisovan” [0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_m...
Do you mind explaining why the current moon hypothesis isn't likely?
The consensus from the intro geology classes I've take seems to be that the Earth was hit by a Mars sized object which caused the resulting molten debris to coalesce and differentiate forming our current Moon in the process.
It is not that the hypothesis is unlikely [0], it is the formation of the moon that is very unlikely. When you try to simulate a collision between the Earth and Mars-sized planet it is very unlikely to create the Moon.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Moon
Why is the moon so unlikely when many planets in the solar system have 1 moon or more.
The Moon is very large compared to the Earth - I have seen the Earth/Moon described as a double planet. How it formed (most likely a collision) is very, very unlikely.
All the other moons in the solar system are nowhere near large enough to stabilise the planet's axis of rotation.
The Moon also has the same rotation and revolution time, so that it always shows the same face to us. I've always wondered if having different rotation and revolution times could have helped humankind to consider the existence of spherical planets a lot before, hence helping progress.
This is one is my favorite comments of all time, simply because while I was familiar with the Fermi Paradox, the rest of the links were new and unexpected. Thank you!
Learning about the great filter can cause depression, reader beware.
Compared with the apparent impossibility of life being created from nothing, I just can not understand why people insist so much that the Great Filter is in the future, instead of the past.
Once I dreamed that I lived through a nuclear war, I dreamed the aftermath and my life scraping and scrapping through a shredded world. The dream brought me to the house in the woods where I live now, but in that world it was tattered and burned and no children lived there. I laid down, grateful for a dry spot and a wall that split the wind. I woke here, but not there.
The article mentions Max Tegmark; if you thought this content was interesting I highly recommend reading Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe. A totally mind expanding read.
It is the most satisfying GUT I have seen described, even if it isn’t rigorous, formal, etc. It simply satisfies my inner voice saying “the feeling that we are special in any way is wrong”.
Naturally, that’s only true for a very emotional level of special :) but so far, I’m happy with just the specialness of being a massively complex life form.
Many worlds hypothesis is the atheistic solution to the observation that our universe appears to be tuned for life.
Not so long ago, it was scientific dogma that all life on this planet was dependent upon photosynthesis. Then some oceanographer types sent some cameras down to the sea floor to look at some hydrothermal vents and... there went that idea! Is our universe tuned for life or is life tuned to its universe?
That would be a great comparison if the many worlds hypothesis were proven or even provable. As it stands, it is basically just a belief which is held to explain the scientific facts. Not much different from ancient man's belief that spirits had influence over the weather cycle. Check out https://strangenotions.com/flew/
Many worlds is an interpretation of quantum uncertainly, but what we seem to be talking about here are multiverse theories.
One of these, M-Theory is an extension of string theory and is the only theory known to elegantly unify quantum mechanics with general relativity's gravitational force in a mathematically consistent way. It’s not supported by experimental evidence yet, but I’d hardly characterise it as no different from belief in spirits.
Actually, I _am_ referring to 'many worlds' (at least according to the technical explanation in this article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/...) and not a multiverse. And yes, there is some hope that there will be some testable empirical evidence at some point, but if in the end it turns out that there are not 'many worlds', then I don't see that big a difference. I'd love it if there were parallel dimensions but it is fantasy at this point.
Really your arguments work equally well for any multiverse theory, be it quantum or cosmological or mathematical.
The argument is also that the universe itself would not exist if certain things did not happen in a very specific way
Shooter and Farmer.
http://peterbutler.me/the-shooter-and-the-farmer/
When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe.
In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.
The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.
"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' "
-- Douglas Adams
To be fair it's not the same thing at all - because the whole point of the article is that by all accounts we shouldn't fit into the hole we're in, we should have been wiped out of our hole long we even had a chance to evolve by comets, asteroids, ice ages, volcanic events or a multitude of other phenomena poised to end life as we know it. That's really what the article is about; sort of a 'humanity, it's improbable that you managed to evolve at all'
Doesn't that break down due to a total measurement bias? That is, if the universe were not tuned for life, there would be no-one around to wonder why that is the case.
Isn't that just the anthropic principle? That's another explanation for a life friendly universe, but not something that can be proved or taken as proof.
But you wouldn't post such things on another day, on another thread, on a topic unrelated. Hacker news and the commenters here are not gods finely tuning comments.
Sure, that's the motivation some atheists have in believing or at least entertaining the idea of a multiverse, but ultimately, it does relatively little to advance atheism, and not just because of its intractability. Fine tuning is an interesting thing to ponder, and certainly a single universe that is finely tuned could lend some support to divine intent, but the real arguments for the existence of God do not hinge on fine tuning or probabilities or any of the standard fare of young earth creationists and the like that philistines like Dawkins enjoy dumping on. The best arguments demonstrate God's existence as a necessary fact following from evident premises. (Btw, Edward Feser has recently publishes a book, "Five Proofs of the Existence of God", on the subject, selecting five that he holds to be particularly important.)
Thanks for the reply. Feser's looks interesting - going to check it out.
Yeah, although I wouldn't say that has much bearing on whether or not it's true.
I think everyone is tempted to accept theories that justify the world view he/she hopes is true.
I didn't get through the whole thing, but if there are big meteor impacts, wouldn't we see them on other planets in the solar system? They mention Hale-Bop for instance. Surely we can work out a probability distribution from the evidence we have besides Earth.
The two largest impact craters we know of are on the Moon and Mars, and those happened about four billion years ago. Of course we'll never know for the gas giants. Not doing the math, but this makes the odds seem pretty low after the initial "flurry" of our solar system's birth, barring Jupiter perturbing an existing asteroid into a collision into earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_craters_in_the...
I think this provides a new answer to the "Great Filter" question. Is it before us or after us? The answer is both.
"It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence."
Lots of misleading casualty statements like this in the article.
Still enjoyed it.
Kind of ironic to think that humans survived a million-year ice age, then might be destroyed by some fool with a button.
If 'our universe' is 'tuned for life', it certainly isn't specifically tuned for human life (e.g. plague, volcanos). Nature offers us no guarantees. Unless we stay in tune with that accord, we will be removed.
Aren't homo sapiens here only because an asteroid strike around 70 million years ago caused a culling that killed the dinosaurs and sort of reset life to favor small mammals over the dinosaurs? If perhaps that had not hit the earth, we would not be here and something that evolved from dinosaurs would be the top of the food chain and typing comments here! We had to get that one strike in at the right time (from our perspective) and then not another semi-apocalyptic event to get to here.
Trippy article. Wikipedia, as always, is a good place for a deeper dive into this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
That's the stuff of nightmares right there.
Kinda bums me out that with data on so many galaxies, we see absolutely zero evidence so far for any galaxy wide effects from intelligent life. It seems likely that intelligent life arising in a single galaxy is rare, and that it's almost certain we are the only intelligent species in our own.
Great mind fuck.
I can't help but think of what the 17 families in Parkland, Florida would think of this article. Especially this quote:
“This is a defense against instantaneous, violent death, which you will find was avoided, but anything that sort of maims or injures or mangles you or whatever is still fair game.”
On the macro scale, he's right. On the human scale, however, your number could be up any second. When I get into debates with people about security and the erosion of rights under the guise of security, I'll eventually say, "You can only be so safe. In the end a determined killer WILL kill someone, even if it's only by biting them to death. There WILL be successful terror attacks. There WILL be random attacks of violence, the question is, how much freedom do I want to lose before I realize that there will always be danger in the world?" That makes people feel I'm a nihilist or something, but it's the truth. I enjoy living, I Want safety for people, but we can't wrap the world in Nerf. Life is a trap no one gets out of alive. If you're alive today, you're lucky nothing killed you along the way, enjoy it while you can. With stuff like the Florida school shooting, we should absolutely do something about guns and gun culture because it's needlessly killing kids. But making me take off y belt at the airport isn't saving anyone, or worse, saying the TSA /customs/the gov't in general should have the right to my passwords to get into my computer because "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide" is absolutely terrifying and wrong.
Presumably they'll agree if they're being rational since it perfectly fits the situation. They may have emotional injuries but not instantaneous death.
Don't forget also, that dying in a bridge collapse is just as bad as dying in a common car crash, which happens every single day in America. Those non-newsworthy people have families too.