Cosmologic philosophy: fine tuning, of carbon (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 11, 2018, 15:28 (2265 days ago) @ David Turell

Without the immensity of the universe and the way carbon is distributed, life would not exist:

http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo46/the-miracle-element.php

"the fact that carbon exists at all is nothing short of a miracle. And for Earth to have been blessed with neither too much nor too little carbon, either of which would preclude the existence of advanced life, is another miracle. And the fact that Earth has its stores of carbon distributed into the just-right locations for the thriving of human civilization ranks as yet another miracle of divine design.

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"One of the more frequent challenges I get from non-theists is the following: "If there is a God who wanted to create a home for human beings, why would he create hundreds of billions of useless galaxies?" The quick answer is that, given the laws of physics God chose for the universe, it is not possible to make a planet on which humans can live and thrive without the hundreds of billions of galaxies. In fact, it is not possible for any kind of physical life to exist without hundreds of billions of galaxies.

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"If it were not for the near equivalences or resonances of the nuclear energy levels of two helium nuclei relative to a beryllium nucleus, and of a beryllium nucleus plus a helium nucleus relative to a carbon nucleus, the universe would contain very little or no carbon and very little or no elements heavier than carbon. Life would be impossible.
Furthermore, unless the difference in the nuclear energy levels between a carbon nucleus and an oxygen nucleus were precisely 0.53 million electron volts, the universe would contain either a lot of carbon and no oxygen or a lot of oxygen and no carbon. Either way, physical life would be impossible in the universe.

"In the early 1950s, astronomer Fred Hoyle and physicist Willy Fowler were the first to understand how critical the relative nuclear energy levels of helium, beryllium, carbon, and oxygen were for making life possible in the universe. Commenting on the highly fine-tuned nature of these nuclear energy levels, Hoyle wrote in an article he published in Engineering & Science,

"A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion beyond question. (my bold)

"Without carbon, life is impossible. However, fine-tuning the universe for the existence of carbon is not sufficient; unless the quantity of carbon in and on a planet is also fine-tuned, physical life—and certainly advanced physical life—will not be possible. A planet with too little carbon will not have a sufficient supply for life chemistry to function. A planet with too much carbon will possess a life-suffocating atmosphere (lung failure occurs at air pressures exceeding three times Earth's) filled with powerful greenhouse gases.

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"As I describe in my book Improbable Planet, extrasolar planets that are the most similar to Earth, and whose carbon amounts astronomers have been able to measure, or at least estimate, have been found to possess about 1,200 times as much carbon-based atmospheric gas as Earth does.3 This much carbon-based atmospheric gas would rule out photosynthetic life, all animals, and likely all physical life on those planets.

"How did Earth become so extremely—and advantageously—carbon-poor? The answer is that it likely was born in a very different location in the Milky Way Galaxy from where it presently resides. Evidence shows that Earth's birth occurred in a dense cluster of more than 10,000 stars (see Figure 2 for an example) located much closer to the center of the Milky Way than Earth is today. There, the primordial Earth was exposed to several nearby supernovae and to the winds of several nearby Wolf-Rayet stars (evolved massive stars that have exhausted their source of hydrogen for fusion burning and are fusing helium and heavier elements in their nuclear furnaces). Consequently, the primordial Earth was bathed in huge quantities of radiation from the radiometric decay of aluminum-26.

"The radiation from the decay of aluminum-26 (half-life = 717,000 years; a half-life is the time it takes for a given quantity of a radioactive substance to be reduced by half) blasted away most of the volatiles (gases and liquids) that the primordial Earth possessed. The Moon-forming event—in which a planet at least twice the size of Mars collided with the primordial Earth (see Figure 3)—that occurred a few tens of millions of years later removed all or virtually all of the volatiles that remained. Later, comets restored a tiny fraction of the volatiles that Earth had lost.

"The end result of this unique early history is that Earth ended up with exactly the right amount of carbon to optimally sustain advanced life. But even that is not the end of the story. The exactly right amount of carbon that Earth came to possess is optimally distributed throughout our planet's environment to give the greatest possible benefit to human life and human civilization. "

Comment: Fred Hoyle was an atheist, but he recognized the design. Design requires a mind to plan the design. That is logic.