In 1913, eminent biochemist Dr. Lawrence Joseph Henderson noticed something of a sore thumb
sticking out in regards to life on earth.
It’s not merely just here, rather it exists under very specific fundamental circumstances,
such as the need for the presence of liquid water, which means the need for the right
temperature, and so on.
And in his book “The Fitness of the Environment” Henderson highlighted that question that subsequently
defined our search for habitable exoplanets and our study of the solar system to this
day.
The importance of liquid water for life as we know it cannot be understated and all that
comes with it.
Without it, no life could exist on this world.
And that’s not even touching chemistry, just the solvent in which it can happen.
And from there it got worse as subsequent science found a number of other variables
much greater than simply earth’s conditions as an exoplanet, such as gravity, electromagnetism,
even the existence of cohesive matter itself had to have the values they do just for life
in the universe to exist.
And there are a lot of them.
It continues, if certain circumstances hadn’t been met, none of this would be here, living
or not.
The universe must be tuned just so for even matter to exist, much less life.
Even an atom of uranium faces the fine tuning problem, and it has little to do with biology.
What parameters were needed for uranium to be able to exist?
Why do the parameters needed for elements heavier than uranium to persist longer than
a short time not exist?
And there’s so much more.
This is a weird universe indeed.
Another example of oddness would be the amount of matter and antimatter produced by the big
bang had to be slightly asymmetric, or all matter and antimatter in the universe would
have annihilated almost immediately after the big bang and there would be nothing here.
If dark energy has a relation to mass, such as if it’s being created by black holes,
even the expansion of the blackness of the universe and the onset of time, if it really
exists in that context, wouldn’t have happened.
Everything would have been a big bang blip for which no measurable trace exists anywhere.
It may be that failed universes might well never have happened for there is no one that
could ever know about them.
This cauldron of chance occurrences and the values of the laws of the universe that allow
it to exist from one perspective can look very strange indeed.
But from another, it can actually look surprisingly mundane.
On the one hand, the argument has been made for some type of intelligent design and that
these parameters and occurrences were baked into the universe defined as a creation.
Whether you subscribe to that interpretation of nature is up to you.
But a variant of this is the simulation hypothesis, where whatever or whoever created the simulation,
if anyone actually did, set the rules in motion but may then leave it alone.
A quasi-creation running on autopilot, or not running on autopilot.
But on the opposite side of things is the multiverse concept which requires none of
that; if there are other universes than this one, then it’s not surprising that a few
would just happen to have the parameters needed for life, but most universes simply do not.
If the multiverse is infinite in the number of universes, then there are infinite amounts
of habitable ones and uninhabitable ones.
All is possible there, more on that later.
Either extreme however requires some rather big assumptions, on the one hand an intelligent
creator, and on the other multiple or even infinite numbers of universes for which we
have no observational way to prove even exist, or from which to even suspect they exist.
And there’s even the possibility that for reasons unknown to us, it may simply be that
there was no other physical way for a universe to be.
Remember, the universe is all that is, ever was, or ever will be.
Not so in a multiverse, where presumably a nothing somehow defines the conditions of
a something, but there seems little hope of ever measuring anything outside of our own
universe.
It’s even been advanced that the universe isn’t a simulation or a creation, but rather
an artificial tweaking of nature by a highly advanced alien civilization that perhaps as
their own universe grew ancient and dark created this one to their parameters and needs in
a lab to provide an escape, and we are merely a tag along result of the factors they set
for their own continued existence.
As unsatisfying as all that is, and frankly ambiguous, it’s what we’re left with when
confronting the fine tuning problem.
There is no easy natural explanation that’s been forthcoming to make the question itself
mundane.
Worse, in confronting the fine tuning problem with one of the few ways we can, the large
Hadron collider, it was expected that we’d see evidence of new physics that might ultimately
provide some insight.
We didn’t, at least so far.
And it pays to remember here how the question of the fine-tuning problem is posed.
It’s often anthropic in nature, a product of human thinking, so it pays to remember
that the universe is not fine tuned for us.
That’s a mistake, we are life, but we don’t define it and we weren’t here for the vast
epic majority of the universe’s existence, and the epic half vast majority of the history
of life on earth.
We are just one variation of life that arose on planet earth, so we must not be tempted
to assign some special significance to human consciousness in this question, that’s an
entirely different can of worms and the nuts and bolts must be tackled first.
What’s astonishing is that the universe produced not merely life, that’s an end
result, but the chemistry for life.
So not only does the universe provide suitable environments for life, it produced water,
and the precursor organic chemistry of life.
Compare that to the parameters and interactions of other chemistry.
You won’t find Gold based life, because it’s very non-reactive.
It just likes to be gold, not incorporate itself into bears.
Similarly, you won’t find helium of much use in biochemistry.
Granted there are known reasons for why this is in practical science, but the fundamental
underpinning that sets the properties of the particles that make them up are generally
unknown.
And there is much more.
Change the value of the charge of the electron, or the ratios of the masses of the proton
and the electron, and it all falls apart.
Change the value of the strong nuclear force, and the hydrogen fusion in stars would produce
a completely different outcome than helium.
Stars as we know them, would be radically different, so much so that it’s possible
the universe’s hydrogen might have been completely exhausted not long after the big
bang, though this is still a subject of some debate.
Think stars that last seconds, and then it’s done, rather than millions, billions or trillions
of years as the various classes of stars as we know them do.
To confound this even more, we don’t even know exactly how many parameters or constants
there actually are that define the behavior of the universe.
Particle physics right now has about 25, all fatal to existence if they were even slightly
different, but General Relativity adds an even weirder one, the cosmological constant.
Change that one, and you mess with the rate of the expansion of the universe.
Despite coming up with it, Einstein never liked the idea of a cosmological constant.
And who could blame him, he concocted it to conform to a consensus he liked.
You see, at the time, the prevailing idea in cosmology was that the universe was static,
it was something that had always existed and never really changed much.
It was always there, was here in his time, and always would be.
Then a wrench was tossed in the works.
And it was tossed in before Einstein came up with relativity.
It just wasn’t noticed.
It comes back to work done around 1912 by Astronomer Vesto Slipher, who determined that
the light from distant galaxies was red shifted.
The light was being stretched by the motion of those galaxies away from us.
Strange indeed.
Then Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, working on that and other previous
work.
Thus came Big Bang cosmology, and the abandonment of the cosmological constant.
Einstein called it his biggest blunder, but strangely the idea came back in force with
the notion of Dark Energy driving the expansion of the universe, but in a different form than
Einstein had envisioned.
We now deal with a new, but related, cosmological constant over a century later.
And we know very little about it.
We don’t yet fully understand the implications of messing around with the possible parameters
of the properties of dark energy, but they could be huge.
We just know that its ultimate value must be small, but make it larger, then what happens?
Bad things.
And this highlights how much we really don’t know about physics and how our different theories
regarding aspects of it interact.
As a result, we don’t know enough about what could set the parameters of the universe.
And there are many other issues.
We have no real idea for example why gravity is so incredibly weak compared to the other
apparent forces of the universe.
That’s one of the major confounding aspects of physics today, gravity on the subatomic
scale is almost non-existent, indeed you need the entire mass of this planet to hold you
where you are.
But play with the parameters, if gravity had been slightly stronger in relation to dark
energy, the universe would have collapsed before planets and life could have ever formed.
Yet If it were too weak, stars couldn’t have formed.
It would be a universe of slowly coalescing clouds of gas.
Indeed, its value is sitting at where it is, what could be called a sweet spot, is rather
odd.
You could play with other questions, what if the universe had more or less dimensions
than it does?
What does that do?
Well, this is also unknown, we don’t know how many dimensions it has.
What if there were two dimensions of time as opposed to one?
The parameters and questions are many.
Yet, when we look at the universe, everything appears to be just so to allow for life.
But again, it’s fully possible that there just isn’t any other way a universe can
be, and the conditions of how this unfolds may become clear with a fully unified theory
of everything being achieved, if ever.
It may someday make perfect sense with a complete enough picture.
But back to the idea of an alien species from another universe creating this one in order
to colonize.
That has some strange implications that have a certain plausibility that can’t be easily
ignored.
Some scientists believe that all of nature can be duplicated if you have the ability,
indeed, we do that all the time, and we improve on it.
Nature produced a horse that can run, and in turn on the same principles of motion humans
produced locomotives with thousands of horsepower.
Nature allows for movement, thus movement can be reproduced by humans.
If that scales up to the creation of universes, which nature clearly did, then it’s not
inconceivable that humans or an alien species with advanced enough technology could create
a universe of their own with whatever parameters they required so they could inhabit it.
This might lead to chains of habitable universes, all artificially created.
One leads to a second, that leads to four, and so on, exponentially creating a multiverse
of ARTIFICIALLY created habitable universes stemming from an initial natural one.
In this case, there could be trillions of habitable universes branching off from each
other, all artificially created and equally habitable being based on the same parameters.
As if our universe wasn’t large enough, one wonders if that leads to a way to travel
between identical, or at least similar universes and survive the trip.
As a result, a solution to the Fermi Paradox comes into play here.
It may simply be that once a civilization achieves an advanced enough technological
level to create an ideal universe for its population, it does that, and then leaves
its parent universe entirely.
In short, you could call it the “no one needs the real estate solution” to the Fermi
Paradox.
We never see them, because they leave not long after they become visible.
And so will we, perhaps soon.
But there’s more, and it’s bad.
So far as we can tell at this point the geometry of the universe appears to be flat, in other
words a line of two parallel railroad tracks will never meet no matter how far across the
universe they stretch.
There are different overall ways for that to unfold, but one of them is the infamous
infinite universe hypothesis.
If our universe is infinite, and any universes spawned from it are infinite in their own
way, then the implication is that all things that are possible, will happen.
If that truely is the case, then not only do other copies of almost exactly earth, and
almost exactly you and I exist in this universe, but it also happens in other infinite universes
working on the same rule as well.
That in turn opens up a rather disturbing possibility.
I’d normally save this kind of video for spooky october on this channel, but on a cold
northern hemisphere dark February night writing at 2:40 in the morning as I often do, I thought
it might be fun to ask this question.
What if the universe itself is a technosignature, and what if it were made by humans, not aliens,
from another universe entirely?
What if it’s not turtles, but humans all the way down, and it all stretches back to
some dead-from-the-start universe of infinite blackness and time where a boltzmann brain
once appeared randomly in the immense, crushing nothingness of such a place and wondered if
it changed just some parameters and created a new universe, what might be possible?
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier, currently a bit chilly even
here in the heated Event Horizon studio.
Wasn’t lying about the cold february night, which there have been a lot of those this
year compared to normal in my area, which gets cold anyway.
But there’s nothing like looking up at the crisp, clear, cold winter sky and wondering
what might be out there.
Even if in a city all you can see is a few stars, it’s still enough to wonder about,
so stay curious and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer
and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we dream.