Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [29]
Third, our universe may not be that exceptional. String theory, for example, allows for 10500 possible worlds, all with different selfconsistent laws and constants.15 That’s a 1-followed-by-500-zeros possible universes (recall that twelve zeros is a trillion!). If that is true, it would be miraculous if there were not intelligent life in a number of them. The physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger created a computer model that analyzes what just a hundred different universes would be like under constants different from our own, ranging from five orders of magnitude above to five orders of magnitude below their values in our universe. He discovered that longlived stars of at least one billion years—necessary for the production of life-giving heavy elements—would emerge within a wide range of parameters in at least half of the universes in his model.16
Fourth, there may be an underlying principle behind all the finetune equations and relationships that will be forthcoming when the grand unified theory of physics is discovered. In the grand unified theory there will not be six mysterious numbers, there will be just one. Here we would do well to remember skeptical principle number two: Before you say something is out of this world, first make sure it is not in this world. Until we have a unified theory of physics connecting the quantum world of subatomic particles to the cosmic world of general relativity, we cannot conclude that there is something beyond nature to explain the anthropic principle.
Fifth, we may live in a multiverse, in which our universe is just one of many bubble universes, all with different laws of nature. Those with physical parameters like ours are more likely to generate life. Cosmologists theorize that there may even be a type of natural selection at work among the many bubble universes, in which those whose parameters are like ours are more likely to survive. According to inflationary cosmology, each time a black hole collapses, it does so into a singularity—the same entity out of which our universe may have sprung. Every time a star collapses into a black hole in our universe, the “other side” of the black hole may yield a new baby universe. Since there have likely been billions of collapsed black holes, there could be billions of bubble universes. Those universes whose initial conditions and physical laws do not produce stars like ours will not have black holes and thus will not reproduce more life-giving universes. Those bubble universes whose parameters are like ours are more likely to give rise to universes with life, perhaps even complex life with brains big enough to conceive of God and evolution.17 How elegantly recursive!
In a slightly different scenario—one in which the universe is created out of a fluctuation in the quantum foam of space (it turns out that space is not so empty at the quantum level and that pure energy may give rise to matter)—Stephen Hawking answered the anthropic principle problem by conjecturing that new baby universes may be created in the same manner: “Quantum fluctuations lead to the spontaneous creation of tiny universes, out of nothing. Most of the universes collapse to nothing, but a few that reach a critical size, will expand in an inflationary manner, and will form galaxies and stars, and maybe beings like us.”18 Indeed, the multiverse is the next natural step in our expanding knowledge of the cosmos: from the earth to the solar system to the galaxy to the universe to the multiverse; that is, from the Copernican revolution that overturned the medieval worldview with the earth at the center and the stars and planets rotating close by on their crystal spheres and created within the last ten thousand years, to the early-modern worldview of the Milky Way galaxy as the entire known universe created within the last several million years, to the modern worldview of an accelerating expanding universe of some 13.7 billion years of age, to a multiverse of