Eh, the universe is largely horrible. Vast expanses of nothingness, where most everything will kill you, and not even with intent but out of sheer indifference. Most animals live on the edge of death and human animals are now far into the process of killing off the biodiversity of the Earth, with ever more inventive and effective means. When, that is, they are not killing each other, or simply sucking dry some parts of the Earth to furnish others. Nature is mostly waste, indifference, and catastrophe. What order there is is mostly just a temporary harnessing of chaos, destined to be undone in the long run. It takes a great deal of self-blinding to see 'simplicity, efficiency, and beauty' as diffuse throughout the cosmos. — StreetlightX

Don't tell me that you wouldn't be amazed if a programmer created AI with just 3 lines of code.

Horrible only to the extent required by symmetry which is mathematical.

Stop using terms you don't understand.

Stop using terms you don't understand. — StreetlightX

What's so difficult to understand here?

Nothing's 'difficult to understand'. You're simply absuing words is all.

Nothing's 'difficult to understand'. You're simply absuing words is all. — StreetlightX

Ok. Thanks.

If you analyze the universe from a mathematical or a scientific perspective then it's a veritable masterpiece. — TheMadFool

:up:

And here lies perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the universe, which is your conscious experience of it and your ethical evaluation of it. From the primordial mass came that, which, even if it arose through billions of years of trial and error, is an amazing feat.

But what is your motivation in assuring us that the universe isn't so amazing, but is instead a veritable junk pile of odds and ends strewn about over the millennia? It seems you wish to be the counterbalance to the wide eyed child who gazes in awe at the starlit sky.

People are too easily impressed. Then they get ideas. Like God. Which only adds to the misery of the universe. It's awful.

Horrible only to the extent required by symmetry which is mathematical. — TheMadFool

What's not symmetrical?

People are too easily impressed. Then they get ideas. Like God. Which only adds to the misery of the universe. It's awful — StreetlightX

Under any scenario there will be no satisfactory explanation for the origin of it all, meaning explaining the first cause is likely impossible and not a fully coherent question. That would be the case whether the universe were complex or not.

God hasn't added to the misery of the universe though, as it seems the theists are preaching a more joyful existence than their opposites, certainly in this thread at least.

God hasn't added to the misery of the universe though, as it seems the theists are preaching a more joyful existence than their opposites, certainly in this thread at least. — Hanover

There's nothing inherently good about joy. It can be abused - and can be made abusive - like most anything else. Joy even accents evil; maybe the only thing worse than acts of evil are acts of evil with a pleasant, happy smile.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not passing value judgements here. Mao's quip is applicable as ever: “There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent.”

There's nothing inherently good about joy. — StreetlightX

Even joy is miserable in the pessimist's view of the universe.

I'm not a pessimist! I believe very much in what Agamben once called the courage of hopelessness. It's those who think things are peachy that you have to worry about. There's no one more pessimistic - and dangerous - than a disappointed optimist. Foucault put it best: "My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. "

Your hero :wink:

What a cutie.

So, it took the ultra-fine balancing of fifty or so constants and ratios to create life on one planet in an insignificant solar system in an unremarkable galaxy. Any outcome that relied on such complex balancing is unstable by definition and would not bode well for the future of Life.

So, it took the ultra-fine balancing of fifty or so constants and ratios to create life on one planet in an insignificant solar system in an unremarkable galaxy. Any outcome that relied on such complex balancing is unstable by definition and would not bode well for the future of Life. — Jacob-B

There's a book I haven't had the time to read: Just six numbers by astronomer Martin Rees.

There's a book I haven't had the time to read: Just six numbers by astronomer Martin Rees. — TheMadFool

THE MEADOWS OF HEAVEN

We as the highest consciousness ever known
And of the most versatile form that’s been shown
Reside as consequent beings in this Earthly realm,
Possibly the most fortuitous creatures
That the universe has ever wrought.

In fact,
We are this universe come to life—
Necessarily from a long line
Of ‘fortunate accidents’.

It had to be this way, for any universe
In which we could emerge
Would have to be appropriate for us
Or we wouldn’t be here to discuss it.

Looking back
We already know ahead of time
That we will discover
The many ‘happenings’
That made us possible.

All this we know and expect
Because we are here.

Perhaps in some other ‘wheres’,
Junkyard universes litter the omniscape,
For they flunked, failed, and miscarried—
A quadrillion trillion universes broken down
For every one that worked to any extent at all.

In some of these forlorn universes
Perhaps the material was inert
And so it just sat there, doing nothing, forever.

In others, maybe gravity was insufficient
Or had no natural place to collect particles
And so it thinned out endlessly,
Spreading coldly toward infinity.

In yet others again,
Even those in the same ballpark as ours,
Perhaps the portions weren’t quite right.
Although they may have formed a few elements,
They went no further than that for a zillion years.

It would also be that all the possibilities-probabilities
That are of so many imbalances must ever trace back
To the near balance of matter and antimatter,
This start no longer seen as improbable.

In our universe the dark chest of wonders
Of Possibility and Probability opened up
In just the just right way:

Naked quarks spewed forth,
Among other things,
And boiled and brewed
In one of the steamiest broths
Ever cooked up.

They somehow simmered and combined
Into the ordinary matter
Of protons and neutrons.

Then quite independently,
By some unknown means,
Dark matter-energy arose as well,
In just the right mix, and, luckily too
Some very long filaments,
Called cosmic strings,
Formed and survived long enough
To be useful as collection agents,
Which were merely imperfections,
As in an unevenly freezing pond—
A kind of a cooling flaw.

None of these happenings were connected,
Except by Potential’s destiny,
So, ‘fortunately’,
The cosmic strings attracted,
By their gravity,
Both dark and ordinary matter,
Which in turn
Attracted even more of the same.

These pearls of embryonic galaxies arose
And were strung along these cosmic necklaces,
As can still be noted today.

So it was
That some almost incidental irregularities,
Frozen out as cosmic anchors,
Were latched onto by matter, both light and dark,
The proportionate portions of which were favorable,
The dark matter dwarfing our ordinary matter
For some reason of a happy ‘circumstance’.

‘Fortuitously’, as well,
Anti-matter, if there ever was any,
Did not fully cancel out the uncle-matter.

The universe could not foresee any of this
In and of itself’s fundamental substance(s),
For if it could have
Then we’d only have the larger problem
Of how the foreseer could have been foreseen,
Ad infinitum…

So it could have been like the ‘trying out’
Of all possibilities in superposition…
A brute force happening
Of every path gone down.

We know much of the rest of the story
Of how the stars and their supernovae
Created the light and heavy elements
Which combined into molecules,
Which ‘auspiciously’
Became able to replicate themselves, as DNA,
And progress to make cells, tissues, and life.

And then there was the luck of oxygen,
A mere waste product of photosynthesis
By bacteria, and later, plants,
That could fill the lungs
As well as build an ozone layer of protection
From the harmful rays of outer space.

Luck on top of luck, good fortune,
And then prosperity…
‘Stumbled along’ the right path.

Of course all this took many billions of years—
And it is of course this long ‘yardstick’
That baffles the mind and sticks in the throat,
But demonstrates the long time lag needed
To produce even the tiniest of advances.

It bears all the hallmarks
Of ‘randomness’ at work,
Although probable
If Potential had it all ‘worked out’.

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth
For over two hundred million years—
Imagine the length of that time.

They were supreme and invincible—
The kings of all the Earth ‘forever’,
On land, sea, and even in the air—
Heading towards forevermore and beyond,
But…

Dame Fortune once again intervened
When the asteroids or some such catastrophe
Finished off the dinosaurs,
As well as 90% of the existing species.

This ‘random’ event left a vacuum
In which newer species could thrive.

Proto-man gave way to near-man
And thence to us, eventually,
When two ‘monkey’ chromosomes fused together,
Making ‘us’ incompatible with the chimps,
And so our ancestors then
Truly descended from the trees!

‘You’ were once a lucky shrew, darting all about,
But then attached to a favorable evolutionary line…
Every single one of your forbears on both sides
Being attractive enough to locate a loving mate,
And they fortunately had the good health to celebrate!

We came to need no specialized niches,
Since we could adapt to any terrain,
Having brains that could learn much more
After birth than instinct could bestow before.

Our higher consciousness
Was the crowning glory—
We had won the human race—
The be all and end all; the grand prize
Of the universal lottery.

So there is nothing more,
Aside from our own progress
To be and learn.
This is it!
That’s all there is.

DNA remembers every step of our evolution—
And you can see this in ‘fast’ motion
When embryos form simply in the liquid womb,
Replicate, and then grow cells
That diversify into a human being
After going through some nonhuman stages.

Thus four billion years compresses into
The nine months of pregnancy.

So then hail and good fortune,
Fine fellows and ladies,
And welcome all of you
To the Meadows of Heaven—
The highest point of all being,
Although we are surely
Still in our infancy.

The path “chosen” by Potential ends here,
With our consciousness.

There were many pockets of universes,
And it is was this very one
That could sing our verses.

The further design
And the role of mankind
Is now in our hands.

We were borne here upon the shoulders
Of so many who have long since come and gone,
All of them advancing the cause,
Over eons of wiles—so here we are.

Hail and good fortune, fine fellows and ladies;
Welcome, all of you, to the Meadows of Heaven;
We are the luckiest sons and daughters of being—
Mediums in a rare universe well done.

Celebrate; live; be,
For everyone dies,
But not everyone lives.



Now thou art in Heaven…

Where is the Intelligence in the Design? — Jacob-B

It's in the vertebral column. No, wait, that's a design flaw.

It's in the vertebral column. No, wait, that's a design flaw. — S

Nor in the eye, for which design we'd flunk our engineering course.

Nor in the eye, for which design we'd flunk our engineering course. — PoeticUniverse

It must be in the teeth, then. Surely there's intelligence there. Why else would we name wisdom teeth so? What problems could they possibly cause?

Amazing program? Haven't you heard about entropy, chaos, and randomness?
And incidentally, there cosmic constants and ratios, most of which are part of the so-called 'fine-tuning