Laetoli footprints (Introduction)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 13:30 (5329 days ago) @ dhw

This thread seems to have very little to do any more with anthropological artefacts! -dhw thinks: "It would be interesting to know if George, as our resident materialist-atheist, believes in other universes." -So perhaps I should respond. The answer is that I don't know, but it is not a theory I like because it violates Ockham's Razor in a comprehensive manner, and we do not have any actual direct evidence of any other single universe let alone an infinity of them, and moreover it is difficult to see how we could have evidence of other universes if they don't interact in some way, so we could never know if they exist or not.-Matt/xeno maintains that: If one wants to argue numbers, David is absolutely right on this point: Given this universe as the ONLY universe, the chain of events leading up to where life could begin is something like winning the lottery every day of your life until you died.-This is indeed something that David Turell tries to argue, repeatedly, but I don't accept his figures. The odds against the first appearance of life may be high, or they may be near to zero. We don't know. I go by what we do know, which is that the universe has been around for 14 billion years, life wasn't there at the start and is here now, therefore it appeared. However it only appeared around 4 billion years ago, and 10 billion years is a lot of time for a lot of things to happen in the zillions of places available in a very large universe. -It could be that Earth is the only place in the universe where life exists, a result of the exceptional conditions here and Earth's exceptional history, or it could be that life is everywhere, but I will only start to believe that when some other life is found.-dhw's view is: "Personally, I'd put the multiverse theory on the same level of faith as an eternal God and a chance-assembled DNA. Fence-sitting as usual!"-But this is a false dichotomy. There are other forces at work in the universe besides chance. I'm referring to chemical and physical forces of course.-Talk about what happened "before the big bang" is just meaningless, as the article by Paul Davies points out. There was no "before". The origin of space was also the origin of time.

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GPJ