Is there a real chance that there is a multiverse?

[Alex K]

Heh, I was talking to our weird friend Arkilogue, not you Aractus
But I still agree with your assessment. I also believe that fine tuning is present and not a figment of the imagination. I don't buy at all the arguments just waving it away like "look at all the empty space, it's hostile, and we don't know how life could otherwise look, and there's only one universe so the concept is meaningless, etc etc.. and I'm annoyed by them. To me it's clear from the physics that by tinkering just a bit with the parameters of the universe, you get one where there are no stars in the best case, and nothing approaching higher order structures in the worst case.

And you know the parameters of the universe can be tinkered with how? Not disputing, but I thought it was as yet unknown whether the cosmological constants could have been different from what they are.

To me it doesn't matter so much whether they can actually be tinkered with - after all what would that even mean. Whether they could have been different, the meaning of that question seems similarly hard to nail down, and depending on how I answer it, I find different related questions. So I don't think that distinction matters to me a lot. The physical parameters as we observe them seem to lie not entirely at random choices but such that matter can form, chemistry can exist, there are stars that actually work.

If that's not the only way they can be set, the question is, why were we so lucky that there is a universe at all where they are set in a sweet spot where there is chemistry and stars.

If for some reason the way they are set is the *only* way they can possibly be, the question becomes - why are we so lucky that the only way the universe can be is such that there is matter, and chemistry, and stars?

Conceptually, the latter is even more problematic than the former if you ask me...