Goldilocks swallows her perfect porridge just fine. But could she swallow the theory that she and the three bears’ house she burgled and temporarily took adverse possession of also depend on a culmination of precise and delicate conditions? If Goldilocks considers our lives and presence as ultimately meaningless—she most likely agrees. On the other hand, if she believes that humans and our role in the universe are intricately crafted, she can also agree, but the plot thickens!
Some argue we roam this Earth owing to a series of “Anthropic Coincidences,” developed before humans, for humans. Anthropos in Greek translates to “human” and a coincidence is a collection of events that yields something improbable. Together, this represents a collection of physical properties and thus events that make life as we know it possible. Weights of atoms, gravity’s strength, and why Taylor Swift’s sound waves sound the way we hear them all support life as we know it; even slight alterations of gravity’s strength or various other physical principles prevent our existence (Okay, Taylor Swift’s music technically has no bearing on our existence, but I’ll allow it). As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow say:
“What can we make of these coincidences?… Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that…is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is what way.”
Continuing this, why aren’t we built like Calliou? No, not experiencing male pattern baldness at an age countable on one hand but completely 2D. Our brains’ development completely relies on a three-dimensional world because complicated neural pathways only work if neurons don’t significantly overlap each other. A four-dimensional world generates additional problems: properties like gravity now depend on distance between two bodies in the x, y, z, and some other dimensions, a proposition that will send planets and stars hurling into one another.
Orion Nebula || Common Domain
Finding a cause or justification for how these physical properties align to create us is a complex task. One answer that many see is religion and that an intentional force, God, intended for all conditions of life to be set the way they are, which is a convincing proposition. Others validate the group of delicate conditions by saying the unlikely just happened or by providing circumstances in which a near infinite number of universes exist with differing physical properties and we inhabit the “correct” one. Unfortunately, we will never collectively know the answer, so the choice is yours. Our world is amazing and statistically impressive yet improbable; I implore you to take nothing for granted, as everything we have is a statistical gift.