A friendly universe?

Let's check with Albert:

When asked by a reporter something like :"What, in your opinion is the most important question facing humanity today?" Einstein thought for a bit then replied, "I think the most important question facing humanity is, 'Is the universe a friendly place?' This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.

"For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly—and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.

"If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially 'playing dice with the universe', then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.

"But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives."

Albert Einstein[33], quoted without a source, as is common with Einstein quotes, at http://www.nlpu.com/Articles/Sept_11.html

The available evidence is both scant and unavoidably prominent. We can say with near-absolute confidence that this particular nook of the universe has, thus far, been compatible with us. We cannot claim more. Apart from a smallish part of one pale blue dot, pretty much all of the universe we know about is startlingly bad for us[37]. If you wish to argue that it has been more than tolerant, you are speaking for legions of dead ancestors of whom we can only say that they struggled to survive long enough to procreate and who might not readily agree. I suggest that "tolerant" is as far as we can go.

There could be only one

None of the available Anthropic Principles appears compelling. The only variant with any truth is also one without any interest: "our place in the universe is a place where our particular form of life can exist". This piece of self-evident circularity might be called the Puny Anthropic Principle (PAP): "We're here because, if we couldn't be, we wouldn't be." We usually choose not to discuss the time-contingent nature of this, but can we guarantee the continuation of our current condition? Of course we are here now; want to bet on tomorrow?

The PAP is indeed pap, and is also a truism: this universe is not inimical to our form of life because, if it were, we wouldn't be sat here trying to figure it out. Attempts to induce a general principle from this single observation lead to subjectivism and speculation. However, for the sake of argument, grant that this universe is one member of a small subset of possible universes, the subset that allows life to exist. (There might be only one such universe, but let's not assume we are that special--see the Copernican Principle below.) Moreover, we can say without much fear of contradiction that this particular universe in which we reside is also a member of another subset subset of possible universes, the one or ones that have actually come into existence. This is a not insignificant observation, but it tells us nothing about frequency or uniqueness. The size of either of these subsets to which our universe belongs ranges from 1 to infinity depending on how speculative your cosmogony is. The size of the overlap between the sets is indeterminable, though logically greater than zero (there is at least one, viz. PAP). So far so relatively uncontroversial.

We humans are clearly one form of life that can exist, but there are lots of other ways, for example sea cucumbers. One subset of All Possible Living Things is the group Living Things That Actually Exist, which contains a subset called Living Things That Can Muster Their Resources To Interrogate The Universe For Answers. That's us; we can do science. Other life-forms may well be able to. I don't see why not, although the sea cucumbers don't seem interested.

The observation that this is at least a partially life-amenable universe is, however, timebound. While this is acknowledged when any of the Anthropic Principles are discussed at book length, it tends to drop off the slogan versions[23]. But, to be rigorous, we can only talk about our proximate neighbourhood of this particular universe over the past few billion years. Yes--"so far, so good". But not necessarily "...and so on".

There is another principle that can be applied here: the Copernican Principle. This requires us to avoid assuming we are special in any way, and is sometimes set against the Anthropic Principle. My position is this: for this universe, we should apply the Copernican Principle ("Principle of Local Mediocrity") but when considering the set of all universes, including lifeless ones, we should appeal to the PAP (as a "Principle of General Specialness"). Thus, we don't need a friendly universe to exist, or to be sea cucumbers-just a compatible one. The only prerequisite for existence is to be. Our particular form of intelligence is fooled by the small and skewed sample size of universes we experience, i.e. one life-bearing one, and so we are in danger of overgeneralizing, thinking that the universe is friendly. This is wrong, but understandable. The universe is Compatible. We are over-reaching to claim more.

Fermi falls out with Einstein

Is this so-far-so-good account of existence relevant to Fermi's paradox? Actually, I prefer "Fermi's so-called paradox": it has certainly never a particularly perplexing question and it can be resolved in a number of ways. One solution is that we may very well be alone--even though we occupy a universe compatible with life, we may for one reason or another be the only example. Another solution, particularly relevant given the Puny Anthropic and Local Mediocrity Principles and the inhuman scale of the universe, is that life may be pretty damn sparse in the universe and faces plenty pitfalls and near-insurmountable obstacles before it can bridge interstellar distances (in proxy or person) to communicate with other exemplars. We can't do that yet and, if we suppose, for the sake of argument, that civilizations cannot advance much further than ours without meeting some decivilizing influence or random existential threat, we may never do so. All our contemporaries may be as parochial as us. The universe may, in the long run (which is the only run that universes are in), be intolerant of intelligent life. Don't think so? Prove it (without appealing to faith).

Einstein wanted a friendly universe. Fermi's so-called paradox suggests that one defensible interpretation of the available evidence is that this is not such a universe. I tend to agree with Fermi here. Decivilizing events and existential threats abound even in this universe. We do not know if the universe could change in the next instant to one that does not allow us to continue to exist. We can appeal to principles of parsimony and universality and say that past states inform future states so the universe will, by and large, remain as it is i.e. compatible. But that is after all based on a sample of one. Perhaps it doesn't take the whole universe to change: perhaps there is a barrier over which civilizations cannot climb. Speculating wildly, this could be philosophical, in the form of a question which inquiring intelligences always ask but which destroys them. The agent of destruction could be a metaphilosophical truth which we cannot of course currently comprehend but which unminds us; it could be an attempt to interrogate the universe that reveals a hidden and irrevocable fragility (an energy threshhold that, when exceeded in a particle accelerator, sets of a chain reaction in local space-time and annihilates the planet). Alternatively, it may be that, on average, this universe, apparently compatible, contains too high a frequency of supernovae for the maximum possible rate of technological development required for a species to reach existential security before getting gamma-hosed[24].

Perhaps things aren't so bleak. Perhaps the universe--huge and inhuman and almost consistently destructive towards our form of life--will continue to support, or not to prevent the continuing existence of, us. If so, can we say, however anthropomorphically, that the universe if "friendly"? I suppose so. However, the conclusion is wobbly because the experiment is not repeatable and we don't know, let alone control, any of the variables. We cannot identify the result if the universe is unfriendly because PAP will no longer apply and we will no longer be asking anthropomorphic questions about the universe. For what it is worth, we can also, with the same reasoning and mindful of the same provisos, say that the universe is currently compatible with science and with Compleat Scientists, whether sea cucumbers or humans.

The scientific method makes several assumptions about the universe (explicability, parsimony, etc.) which have worked so far. These assumptions are subject to the same sort of limitations as assumptions of a friendly or indifferent or tolerant universe and may be falsified at any time. So, in lieu of an explicit declaration of well-meaning love emanating from the universe, I humbly suggest that you seize the day.

Other discussions on this topic

• Is The Universe Friendly? (article by Jeff Olson, copied in several other places, that came out while I was drafting this.)
• Some other stuff I won't directly cite by people keen to make you their coreligionist