The alternative, that abiogenesis is really difficult, strikes me as unlikely, and I have a very strong skepticism of anthropic “explanations”.
I keep running into people who think anthropic reasoning doesn’t explain anything, or that have it entirely backwards. One prominent physicist whose name eludes me commented in an editorial published in physics today that anthropic reasoning was worthless unless the life-compatible section of the probability distribution of universal laws was especially likely. This so utterly misses the point that he clearly didn’t understand the basic argument.
I’ve never encountered anyone who’s willing to admit to buying anything stronger than the weak anthropic principle, which seems utterly obviously true:
1) If the universe didn’t enable the formation of sapient life, it wouldn’t exist (edited to clarify: sapient life, not the universe). If the universe made the formation of such life fantastically unlikely in any one location but the extent of the universe is larger than the reciprocal of that probability density, it would likely exist.
2) Our existence thus doesn’t indicate much about the general hospitability of the rules of the universe to the formation of sapient life, because the universe is awfully large, possibly infinite.
3) In the event that the rules of the universe that we observe are consequences of more fundamental laws, and those fundamental laws are quantum mechanical in nature so that multiple variants get a nonzero component, then the probability of life forming in this universe is taken as the OR among all of those variants.
I keep running into people who think anthropic reasoning doesn’t explain anything, or that have it entirely backwards. One prominent physicist whose name eludes me commented in an editorial published in physics today that anthropic reasoning was worthless unless the life-compatible section of the probability distribution of universal laws was especially likely. This so utterly misses the point that he clearly didn’t understand the basic argument.
I’ve never encountered anyone who’s willing to admit to buying anything stronger than the weak anthropic principle, which seems utterly obviously true:
1) If the universe didn’t enable the formation of sapient life, it wouldn’t exist (edited to clarify: sapient life, not the universe). If the universe made the formation of such life fantastically unlikely in any one location but the extent of the universe is larger than the reciprocal of that probability density, it would likely exist.
2) Our existence thus doesn’t indicate much about the general hospitability of the rules of the universe to the formation of sapient life, because the universe is awfully large, possibly infinite.
3) In the event that the rules of the universe that we observe are consequences of more fundamental laws, and those fundamental laws are quantum mechanical in nature so that multiple variants get a nonzero component, then the probability of life forming in this universe is taken as the OR among all of those variants.
That’s really all there is to it...