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Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers to explain how the universe made us

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In some detail, but he concludes:

If we were to rewind the clock to the initial formation of our Solar System and run the clock forward again a billion times, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that human beings would arise even once. But if we were to rewind the clock back to the early stages of the hot Big Bang, a Universe filled with stars, galaxies, rocky planets, Sun-like stars, and trillions upon trillions of chances at life would be all but inevitable.

The reason is simple: the laws and raw ingredients of the Universe are always the same. A Universe born with normal matter will produce the light elements; a Universe with density imperfections will produce a first generation of stars; a Universe with dark matter will hang onto that ejected material and form stars with heavy elements; a Universe with a second generation of stars will form rocky planets and Sun-like stars; and a Universe with rocky, Earth-like planets will enable life to exist, survive, and thrive for billions of years. The rest might all be up to chance, but that’s what made our existence possible. It’s up to all of us not to squander it.

Ethan Siegel, “How Did The Universe Make Our Existence Possible?” at Forbes

The proponents of chance origins tend to make it look less likely all the time.

Comments
Still waiting for an explanation how the non-telic universe made brains and wired them up the way they are. (Crickets)mike1962
July 28, 2020
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Ethan Siegel paints a romantic analogy between the growth of a human and the formation of the universe that's punctuated by things "we know." It seems like he's counting on a singularity as a common start point for cosmic inflation and the expansion of the universe. Nevertheless, small perturbations in the initial stages of the universe resulted in the observed massive irregularities in the scattering of various types of galaxies, galactic clusters, and gas clouds. Their formation and distribution is reminiscent of what one would expect from a chaotic (butterflies in Brazil) process. His analogy breaks down when one considers the massive amounts of data encoded in human DNA and epigenetics, the cosmic equivalent of which is not known to have existed in the early universe. But I did appreciate his reverent, celebratory, and perhaps even giddy portrayal. ;-) -QQuerius
July 28, 2020
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