a short essay on` is humanity alone in universe?`
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The debates about whether sentient life is a unique phenomenon in our universe or not has lasted decades. From dogmatic beliefs about humanity having been created by a deity, public opinion has mostly moved to a more flexible, diverse outlook. Since it became known that there is life out there, experts have mostly debated about the possibility of an intelligent, self-conscious species existing somewhere in space.
Some believe if alien life does exist, it is necessarily better developed than humanity. It is supposed to possess a progressive culture, faster-than-light spaceflight secrets, and advanced technologies and weapons. The thought about humanity being inferior to alien species provokes fear, which has been manifested in popular culture for the last hundred years. Others think that even if there is sentient life in space, it does not necessarily outstrip the human race in terms of development. It is possible that such a race would be stuck in its own analog of our medieval epoch, with the most advanced technology in its possession being gunpowder. Or, it could be a race of primitive hunting animals with bows and spears, living in tribes, and dancing around bonfires.
welcome to the ‘anthropic principle’, a kind of Goldilocks phenomenon or ‘intelligent design’ for the whole Universe. It’s easy to describe, but difficult to categorise: it might be a scientific question, a philosophical concept, a religious argument – or some combination. The anthropic principle holds that if such phenomena as the gravitational constant, the exact electric charge on the proton, the mass of electrons and neutrons, and a number of other deep characteristics of the Universe differed at all, human life would be impossible. According to its proponents, the Universe is fine-tuned for human life.
This raises more than a few questions. For one, who was the presumed cosmic dial-twiddler? (Obvious answer, for those so inclined: God.) Second, what’s the basis for presuming that the key physical constants in such a Universe have been fine-tuned for us and not to ultimately give rise to the hairy-nosed wombats of Australia, or maybe the bacteria and viruses that outnumber us by many orders of magnitude? In Douglas Adams’s antic novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), mice are ‘hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings’ who are responsible for the creation of the Earth. What if the Universe isn’t so much anthropic as mouse-thropic, and the appearance and proliferation of Homo sapiens was an unanticipated side effect, a ‘collateral benefit’?
For a more general perspective, in The Salmon of Doubt (2002), Adams developed what has become known as the ‘puddle theory’:
[I]magine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’
It appears that Adams favoured a puddle-thropic principle. Or at least, the puddle did.