Mind-Boggling Questions

[SkepticalMoron]

Here's some mind-boggling questions I've been pondering for a few years now.
Why is life the way it is?
What was outside the Big Bang?
Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)

These questions aren't thoroughly detailed but...meh, I'm only 16...

[Ben Davis]

[Silas Stingy]

Here's some mind-boggling questions I've been pondering for a few years now.
Why is life the way it is?
What was outside the Big Bang?
Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)

These questions aren't thoroughly detailed but...meh, I'm only 16...

I was once 16. And, ever since then I have been pondering the very same questions.

If I ever find answers to them I'll post here.

[festive1]

I think Silas summed this up nicely. The only addition I would make is: We make our own meaning. We will likely never know the answers to these questions, but if we strive for our own happiness, we just may find it, at least in part.

---

Also, trust the truth seekers, but mistrust those who claim to have found the Truth.

[Faith No More]

Why is life the way it is?
What was outside the Big Bang?
Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)

We don't know. The real question then becomes can you be comfortable with that, or do you need to create a fantasy to give you comfortable yet false answers?

[The Grand Nudger]

Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)

Depending on how much of that you allow me to trim off, a strong and resounding "yes", it -could have-. Whether or not it did, meh, we don't know. Doesn't seem to be the case here on this rock.

When we go out into the space around us looking for life, for example, what we're really looking for is "life like our own" - carbon based life, with a heavy emphasis on liquid water. Since our own brand of life is the only type we know of we might be able to excuse this bias practically....we have to start somewhere, and if we don't narrow down what we're looking for all we get back is noise (especially considering the vastness of the searched area). On the other hand, we may have set ourselves up to miss vast amounts of life teeming right under our noses at some point by narrowing our definition a bit too much. 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics...hmn, I don't know, how would we even be able to detect something like that? Our instrumentation (including our biological machinery) relies on the physics we "know", the dimensions we are privy to (maybe read flatworld for some interesting thoughts on this though - there's a small teaser from Carl Sagan about it on youtube). But something not carbon based or reliant on liquid water...well, one can imagine a scenario where that flies "under the radar" so-to-speak...since thats what we have the radar tuned to detect, in this instance. The folks who wonder about this sort of thing professionally are engaged in something called hypothetical biochemistry, and it is absolutely fascinating (imho). I wouldn't write it off as the irrelevant musing of a 16 year old mind...because if you spent the rest of your life wondering about this and come to any conclusions you will have done our species (and the advancement of knowledge) a great service. Now, suppose that there is no other form of exotic biochemistry, no shadow biosphere, after all we have no evidence for it so that's a safe assessment of the situation for the time being. Understanding how life might have arisen by other means still gives us insight as to why it arose through the means we are familiar with. It gives us something to compare our own biochemistry with, even if it's firmly hypothetical.

No dumb questions...and all that jazz.

(if nothing else the notion has spawned countless Sci-Fi greats)

Why is life the way it is? Because square pegs don't fit round holes.

[Ben Davis]

I wouldn't write it off as the irrelevant musing of a 16 year old mind...because if you spent the rest of your life wondering about this and come to any conclusions you will have done our species (and the advancement of knowledge) a great service.

Hitch69, I just want to reinforce this point of Rhythm's. The human ability to ask 'what if?' is our greatest intellectual tool. The reason we understand surface tension is because someone once asked the question 'what if water collected in big spheres?'. The reason we understand (as much as we do about) atoms is because someone asked 'What if objects could pass through each other?'.
Keep asking those questions.

[Simsim]

Here's some mind-boggling questions I've been pondering for a few years now.
Why is life the way it is?
What was outside the Big Bang?
Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)

These questions aren't thoroughly detailed but...meh, I'm only 16...

Hi Hetch, I will give answers within the scope of my knowledge and, of course, my linguistic abilities:

Why is life the way it is?

because if it was anything other, the question would be the same This question would be posed at all cases.

OK... Our life is a carbon-based life, because carbon is tetravalent so it can form 4 bonds and long molecular chains which are the main stay of life.
Also carbon is relatively abundant in the universe, because physical laws allow it to be abundant.
A marked counterpart of the carbon-based life is the silicon-based life, because a silicon atom resemble that of carbon as it have 4 electrons in the outer level. But, of course, the silicon-based life is a hypothetical model that we haven't detect, and we mainly will not. I think scientists one day will produce this hypothetical form in their laboratories, but this will happen after preparing the complicated forms of our lives.

What was outside the Big Bang?

Nothing !

There is no even space outside there. You may ask in which thing had the universe expanded?
The expansion is not into a "place" outside the universe, but it is an expansion inside the universe. All the matter is that distances increase within the universe. Distance is a physical quantity like time and mass. If you look at distance as physical quantity involved in the universe you will not need to suppose "another distance" outside the universe to permit the universe to expand into.

But the concept of the "nothing" differs from classical physics to general relativity to quantum fields. I think it needs a separate particular topic.

Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)

Einstein asked if God had a choice in creating the universe. He meant to ask if this set of physical laws was inevitable and the universe couldn't be made and governed according to other sets.

Of course this is a hard question. I think Einstein thought that this is the only set of laws which the universe could have. But modern science predicts infinite numbers of universes with in infinite number of sets of physical laws, and then even the styles of lives or universes which you think they are improbable or impossible are, if fact, inevitable.

Multiverses have many visions and many perspectives. One of them that the universe must take every possible path, but we are concerned only with our path which we can observe because the other paths are not "realities" with respect to us.

[popeyespappy]

Could life have happened in a way we cannot perceive? (Like having 67 dimensions and totally different laws of physics, etc)

Victor "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings" Stenger has published quite a bit on fine tuning. His brief article Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Us? is a nice summary of his thoughts on the subject.

[Edwardo Piet]

Why is life the way it is?

I reckon that it is either due to a chain of predetermined prior causes or due to a mix of different probabilities of specific happenings.

And as for why there is something rather than nothing: because there can't be nothing.... because nothing can't be anything. Because that makes no sense.