Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic

John Derbyshire speculating on "intelligent design."

Here. More if you scroll down a bit. I'm wondering why this subject suddenly seems to be all over the place out there. Did I miss something? Did the tsunami really get that many people staring at their bellybuttons?

Some of the answers seem so obvious to me, don't know why people are sweating over them. The "coincidence" thing Derbyshire mentions:

The "coincidence" point (i.e. "How come physical constants are just precisely what they need to be in order for us to exist?") is very fascinating to any thoughtful person. I have never seen an answer that struck me as very satifactory; but the non-ID answers -- e.g. the Anthropic Principle in its various forms (Google it) -- are at least as satisfactory as the ID ones ("Because God made things that way.")


Of course, the simple answer is that everything is just right for our current existence because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to think about it. There may be billions of parallel existences where things aren't just right, and nobody is there.

It's kind of like dropping a billion pennies from a roof, and marveling that one landed on its edge. A billion-to-one chance! Isn't that amazing?

One also assumes that one requirement for a universe billions of years old, that doesn't just collapse on itself or vanish seconds after any "Big Bang," is a highly-stable set of physical constants.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (2 posts)