(November 5, 2012 at 7:18 am)Kirbmarc Wrote: This is the infamous anthropic principle, and it's a fallacy. This universe is not built for life to happen, life is built to happen in this universe. Without Earth, life would have started somewhere else. With different laws of phyisics (assuming that different laws of physics are even possible), there wouldn't probably be a place for carbon-based life, but there will probably be something else.I partly agree, but only partly. Carbon is the only atom that is capable of producing life. It is the rudimentary building block of life as we know it. No other atom can be used so diversely, and have such an influence over the laws of chemistry. We don't just need carbon, we don't just need the correct laws of chemistry to govern it, but we also need an abundance of carbon, we need a mechanism for it to be created and fill the universe. If we had Carbon, but it was less abundant, we still couldn't have life.
The other thing is that reductionism assumes that only one set of rules can give rise to the features and functions of the system. But in fact I do believe that different underlying rules have the ability to converge and produce similar if not identical results. In your example, taking out carbon, and replacing it with something else. But this is not possible with everything.
The "simple" high-level observable rules come from such a convoluted and complicated inner working of the supposed fundamental laws of the universe (are these laws really that important anyway?); worse still they're built layer upon layer. My argument isn't that you can't create life with a different set of rules, my argument is that this universe is designed specifically for us, if it wasn't then life may exist, but we would expect the universe to be more hostile to it than ours is to us. Ours is fundamentally hospitable to life.
