Ask Lemmy

The way that particles interact with each other, the way bonds are formed, the way entropy is held off just long enough that a bag of 10^26ish atoms can examine itself and make cat memes… the laws of physics themselves suggest to me that something with some sort of a will or intellect set things in motion.

You are not independent of your observation. The probability that you live in a universe cable of supporting life is 100%. It would be impossible for you to observe any other kind of universe. Any universe incapable of supporting life will contain no observers.

For all we know there are an endless number of universes, mostly with laws of physics vastly different from our own. The universe itself seems to already be spatially infinite, why not also have infinite universes? There may be a vast ocean of universes out there, and the vast, vast, vast majority are completely uninhabited and uninhabitable. Realms containing only black holes. Universes where only light exists. Spaces where the universe is born as a cloud of hydrogen gas, and simply never gets beyond that. Maybe for every one universe capable of supporting life, then there are 10^(stupidly large number) of empty universes.

It may seem strange or unscientific to postulate other universes, but it's a lot more scientific than postulating an intelligent, conscious creator that set the universe in motion. In the latter case, you're simply assuming more of something that we already know can exist - a universe. You're just assuming universes with different physical contants or laws. In the latter, you're assuming the existence of an entity that has no other parallel examples. We don't seem to live in the world of Greek myth where there's multiple deities running around we can all openly observe. If you assume a creator, you're assuming something that has no evidence for any entity of its kind existing. If you assume multiple universes, you're simply assuming more of what we already know exists.

It is telling that we don't live in a particularly habitable universe. Sure, we can tinker with the physical constants to make life impossible. But for a universe so "fine tuned" for life, an astonishingly insignificant fraction of the universe's space is habitable by life. An astonishingly small amount of matter is living or even involved in sustaining life.

And the best the universe can seemingly do? In our solar system? A thin slime of life on a single wet rock, maybe some bacteria in some ice shell moons or deep subsurface bacteria on Mars? And the jewel of the system, Earth? That thin shell of life requires an entire planet to give it a surface to live on. And then the mass of an entire Sun is needed to keep Earth's surface habitable. That's the best environment for life the universe can naturally create. I'm sorry, but from an engineering perspective? If you are writing the very laws of physics and reality? You can certainly do better than what we have.

The universe is not fine-tuned for life. Such a universe would be one where the vast majority of space, matter, or both were habitable. It would be one that can efficiently support life, not requiring entire astronomical bodies to support rounding errors worth of living matter. If the universe was designed for life, it was designed by a shit designer. Maybe God's an apprentice deity and we're his practice project.

What we live in is a barely habitable universe. Look around you. The stars seem mostly dead. Our own solar system is dead rock after dead rock (with some possible exceptions.) We live in the type of universe that most observers would live in if there were a huge number of universes with randomly assigned physical constants. In such a setup, there may be some hyper-local optima where universes could be superhabitable, but their total number of inhabitants would likely be swamped by observers in universes that were just habitable enough to get life going.

The seemingly-logical need for a creator disappears if you simply postulate multiple universes. And our observable reality really does match well with us living in a barely habitable universe, which is what we would statistically expect if there were a large number of universes in existence.

I think I get what you’re saying, but if you’ve ever looked into particle life simulators, they are much less susceptible to the “going static” you talk about. The more properties that exist, even purely randomized, the more likely you’ll get extended chaotic behavior. (Also the current scientific outlook is that our universe is technically destined to “go flat” just like those scenarios you mentioned)

The real issue with your reasoning from a scientific standpoint is that we don’t know how many universes there are. Maybe there are an uncountably infinite number of universes holding every possible combination of physical rules. Then in these universes there would be infinite universes that evolve life like ours without needing a creator. You can’t say/prove/estimate the chances of a universe having life producing rules because you have no idea how many universes might exist at all.

Furthermore, the probability that we just happen to exist in one of the possible universes that is capable of harboring life like this is actually 100%. This is a fact because, if a universe couldn’t harbor life like ours, we wouldn’t exist in it.

Also on the note of random chance creating the complexity we see in life, have you heard the theory that life didn’t start on earth and actually might’ve started only a few million years after the big bang?

There was a period of time after the first stars had created the lighter elements (the ones life uses like carbon nitrogen oxygen) where the universe was much closer together, and with enough pressures/temperatures that the conditions for water to exist and remain in liquid form were prevalent.

We know from the old studies of trying to prove life could spontaneously emerge that if you add energy (like UV light from stars) to water and nitrogen and carbon, you do get organic compounds: amino acids, alcohol, ketones, etc. So the basic building blocks of life probably existed in relative abundance in parts of the universe at this time.

Now the universe would have been in this state for millions of years. A relatively dense, warm, wet universe for millions of years and have still larger than our galaxy. I’d imagine the chances of RNA forming viroid rings somewhere in a cloud that size are relatively high. And after that, well RNA + basic amino acids + energy + time is pretty much all you need to get evolution going.

That’s my favorite life starting theory, especially since it kind of fits better with our model of genome growth rate over time.

Anyway, the problem of not knowing how many universes there are/have-been/could-be is the real reason no one can actually say or “calculate the probability” of how likely a universe with life is. But I thought you might find it fascinating to learn that life could’ve started in much better conditions and a lot longer ago than you may have thought when you originally did your math.

Sidenote: if intelligent life must be created by some intelligent thing, where did that intelligent creator come from in your theory? Is there an infinite chain of creators creating universes? If not, if intelligent life can be created without needing a creator, then your main assertion must be false. If it does loop or go on forever, then the full set (universe) of these chained universes actually does either exist forever or loops indefinitely meaning it in total was not created by a creator, again contradicting your assumption that life must be created by a planned process.