Strong Anthropic Principle

[ffutures]

Thinking about The Struggle for Empire and its implausibly habitable worlds.

The anthropic principle, if I'm remembering it correctly, says that our universe can have habitable worlds because we wouldn't be able to observe it if it didn't.

How much doubletalk do I need, short of invoking a friendly deity or deities, to have the universe habitable because it wants to be observed?

Later - to make this clearer, in TSfE every world of the solar system, at least from Venus to Neptune, appears to be habitable. If we go with the Anthropic Principle there needs to be a reason why the universe wants to be observed at close range. Maybe light speed could be a limitation, without close observers the universe starts to feel uncertain...

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Frank Tipler and John Barrow got there circa 1988 in their book, "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle". Then Tipler had to spoil it by coming over all Jeezemoidly in the 90s with "The Physics of Immortality", which is what happens when a cosmologist tries to square the circle of fundy Christianity with contemporary astrophysics.

You don't need much doubletalk; you just need an emergent non-time-bound deity (i.e. one that arises from the existence of intelligent life like us and can propagate its effects back in time).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Actually that would explain quite a lot in that book - the space battle that gets disrupted because of a temporary lack of æther might be explicable in terms of such a deity flexing its muscles a little...