From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Mon Jan 12 1998 - 06:35:04 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> "Warrl kyree Tale'sedrin" <warrl@mail.blarg.net> writes:
>
> > > perhaps, but who's to say that life cant exist within other parameters?
> >
> > The catch is that with very minor variations in these physical
> > constants it wouldn't be "life" that is impossible, but some more
> > basic phenomena.
>
> Yes, but life (in some generalized meaning) could possibly exist in an
> universe where there were no elements but instead (say) topological
> defects in several weakly interacting fields with nonlinear properties
> or something equally alien.
>
> What is really relevant here is the question: what parameter-settings
> allow complexity to grow to the level of living systems and possibly
> beyond? A very hard and interesting question. Current work in
> complexity *might* shed a little light upon if it arrives at some
> general rules for the appearance of complex systems.
>
There was a really good program on the Discovery Channel about this
whole subject. Some physicists are try to show that the reason life
exists is because the conditions which are conducive to life, are also
conducive to whatever cosmological processes create new universes. Since
it is though right now that new universes are created by the creation of
black holes in ours, and that ours must have sprung from a similar
singularity in another universe, whatever the cosmological parameters we
have now are in the range which are most likely to be produced by a
singularity in another universe, and are most likely to create as many
other similar universes from singularities in ours, as a sort of
darwinian probablistic natural selection on a multiversal scale. We are
a side effect.
There are now not only scientists trying to prove this theory, but also
some that are trying to disprove it.
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