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...

Huygens

[3pitaka.livejournal.com]

Christiaan Huygens, the 17th-century astronomer and discoverer of the moon Titan, in his book Cosmotheoros, argues for the habitability of all the planets. His idea, as far as I can understand it, is that God would not have created the planets pointlessly, but that such worlds, akin to the Earth in size and substance, must exist in order to house life: "should we allow the Planets nothing but vast Deserts, lifeless and inanimate Stocks and Stones, and deprive them of all those Creatures that more plainly speak their Divine Architect, we should sink them below the Earth in Beauty and Dignity; a thing that no Reason will permit...".

And, this being so, Huygens argues that each planet will have its own airs and waters, suitable to its size and distance from the sun, from which the life of each world can find sustenance; and that the life will be different from ours in detail, but of the same basic kind, with shapes suitable to their mode of locomotion, which will in turn be constrained by the geography of each planet; and that among them will be "their Inhabitants: not Men perhaps like ours, but some Creatures or other endued with Reason. For all this Furniture and Beauty the Planets are stock'd with seem to have been made in vain, without any design or end, unless there were some in them that might at the same time enjoy the Fruits, and adore the wise Creator of them."

And he goes on to ascribe to his 'Planetarians' reason, and the five senses, and arts, and sciences, and geometry and astronomy and writing, and an ordered society; and by turns he argues that they must have a form not utterly different from the human. All very plausibly, sensibly, and Platonically argued; and, alas, for the most part very far from the truth.

Re: Huygens

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry - I only just noticed this - that's exactly the sort of justification I need. Many thanks.