How can anyone say that this universe was designed for Humanity?

But part of the "fine-tuning" argument is that conditions and physical laws have to be just so not only to have life as we see it today, but to allow for the development of any kind of life, in the loosest definition we have. For instance, in order to have life, we must have matter. But that matter must be able to interact and form compounds with different chemical properties, etc. and so on.There's all kinds of imaginable universes that won't support life of any kind. Ones with no matter. Ones where the matter is spread out so thin it never interacts. Ones where the universe has so much matter it collapses before life can form. Ones where there's so much energy and heat that compounds can never be stable.That's the conditions they're referring to in "fine-tuning" arguments - conditions that could prevent any kind of life, not just the kind we have.Designed for humanity? Not likely. But certainly, out of all possible universes, the subset with inital conditions suited for the eventual development of life must be a very small minority...[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 04-19-2003]

Are you sure they aren't better than us? They can survive on less food, in harsher conditions, with greater exposure to carcinogens, toxins, and radiation. In fact if humans manage to poison almost all life into extinction, it'll be the cockroaches that are left.More seriously, why do you think "purpose" exists outside of your own mind? Most people can't agree on the "purpose" of life beyond either personal satisfaction or distant, generalized moral platitudes. If purpose is some kind of absolute quality of the universe then everyone should be able to agree on what it is. In that sense, if a universal purpose genuinely exists, it should in fact be able to be emprically verified.------------------
Epimenedes Signature: This is not a signature.

But we don't know the qualities of "all possible universes". Since we only have one universe we don't know what kind of universes can exist. For all we know there's some kind of deeper restrictions on what universes can exist. Maybe the only universe that can exist is ours, or ones just like it. Who knows? Any speculation is fruitless.

Hrm, perhaps you'd like to tell us what aspect of string theory posits what universes can and can't exist?

Sure. The fine-tuning requirements are significantly more specific, however - they include such metrics as the rate of initial expansion (niether too fast nor too slow) and the ratio of matter to anti-matter formed from that intial burst.As far as I know, string theory doesn't really speak to these inital contraints, but I could be wrong. That was the point of my question - how specific does string theory get when telling us what kind of universes could exist or couldn't? Not very, it seems to be.

My point is, with a sample space of only one universe - ours - we have no idea at all what the restrictions could be. String theory could be in error - or there could be additional laws that prohibit certain types of universes, outside of string theory.

Do you mean, the laws that govern the behavior of entities in our universe, or the laws that govern the behavior of universes themselves? Because I think those are two different things.

Because all your other universes are simply inferred. This universe is the only one for which we have any data.

I'm not sure I believe in that, either. No matter how well 10 dimensions might balance the equations, I'll believe them when there's experimental evidence. That's the final arbiter, to me.

But see, with only one universe as a sample you can't know that.It's like, I show up at your door with a little black box that says "3" on a screen on the front. I ask you "what are the odds that my box picked the number 3?"From one number, you can't know. For all you know, all the box can display is 3. Or, it rolls a 6-sided die and displays the number, so the odds are one in six. Or perhaps it picks a number between 1 and 1000. Or 1 and 1,000,000. Who knows? And unless you do, you can't give odds about what the box is going to display.