----- Original Message ----- From: "Hal Finney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 3:24 PM Subject: Peculiarities of our universe
> There are a couple of peculiarities of our universe which it would be > nice if the All-Universe Hypothesis (AUH) could explain, or at least > shed light on them. > > One is the apparent paucity of life and intelligence in our universe. > This was first expressed as the Fermi Paradox, i.e., where are the aliens? According to the anthropic principle, all conditions are such that our existence is possible. Also, all events up until now have been such that they favored our existence. This doesn't necessarily mean that those events were probable. In fact, they could have been wildly improbable. (that asteroid killing the dinosaurs at just the right moment might have helped us) Let us say you're repeatedly throwing a thousand dice on the floor, and that you are waiting for a pattern of fifty sixes to group close together on the floor. When they finally show up, it's doubtful that another distinct group of fifty sixes will show up in the same throw. In this analogy, the floor and dice represents (roughly) *this* universe and its galaxies and stars, and the groups of fifty sixes represent planets harboring intelligent life. After all, we seem to be very, very complex creatures. Most of the matter in the universe looks quite disorganized in comparison. Wouldn't this intuitive analogy explain why life is so rare ?
