Adam Brown: evaluation

Transcript context

…How confident are we that these different properties of different universes would actually be inconsistent with intelligent life? That's a great question. This line of thought starts to be a skeptical response to the anthropic principle. An example that sometimes people use is a puddle that's sitting in some depression in the ground reflects on how wonderful the universe is, that this depression in the ground seemed to have been made the perfect shape for the puddle to exist. And our view would have said, "No, the reason the puddle has that shape is because it isn't self-adapted to the hole in the ground. " Maybe no matter what the laws of physics, there would be something that emerged there. Certainly, if you go to the bottom of the sea, or in nuclear reactors, or in various other places, this kind of life will find a way. Philosophy seems to be adapted at least there, where it's very different from the surface of the Earth where we find ourselves. And yet they're able to be, certain life is able to live in undersea vents and is able to adapt itself to those environments. I think I basically buy that life is quite adaptable, but whether life is adaptable enough that a universe with a cosmological constant that ripped it apart every microsecond, that seems implausible to me. Or even closer to home, the center of the sun. It's not clear exactly whether we can get intelligent life living at the center of the sun, even though that has the same laws of physics as us. It just has a different environmental variable. What is the most underappreciated discovery in cosmology in our lifetime?…

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