A little more cosmology

OK, second post for the day - I started to answer this in comments, but it got a bit unwieldy.

Martin observed:
Of course, the fact is that we exist and are sufficiently self-aware (ordered) to question why the universe is so ordered. I suggest that situation was _much_ more likely to have arisen in a relatively ordered (low entropy) universe.
Accordingly, the proposition that a low entropy universe was unlikely in some general sense is meaningless. Given the condition that intelligent beings are questioning the nature of their universe, I would suggest that the likelihood is high that they live in a low entropy universe.

It is a bit like knowing some one has thrown dice (each 1-6) totalling 10 - impossible if they only threw one die, unlikely if they threw 2 dice, but unexceptional if they threw 3 dice.

Bottom line - nothing about an event which only occurs once (that is, is truly unique, not one of a class of similar events) can be used as inference. Likelihood and probabilty are concepts properly applicable to repeated events.

The idea that this is true because we are here to observe it, has been labelled the anthropic principle*, and in the overall article, Carroll ... hmm, I was going to say addresses this, but actually he more or less just hand-waves in the direction of it without really taking it on board.

I have to say I'm decidedly iffy about the whole proposition of 'what the universe should be like' as it is so freighted with undefined expectations as to be untenable, and I have to concur that judging from a unique event is just a dodgy idea at best.


And also:

Of course the corollary of my view is that it is very likely (IMO vitually certain) that there are other intelligent beings elsewhere in our universe.
It is furthermore very likely that some of them (about half, for lack of any evidence) are cleverer and more advanced than us. Unfortunately, a race that is clever and expansionary enough to reach us may not be particularly nice (the nice races who are ecologically balanced etc will not have the same pressure to expand and seek out new frontiers). Our fate could easily be comparable to that of the Australian Aborigines - pushed aside by more powerful and numerous aliens looking to exploit the resources of our part of the universe in ways we didn't even know existed.
But it is also very likely that any aliens are all so far away that they will never contact us - so who cares.

One could also postulate that any race clever enough to survive and expand without poisoning their environment might have awoken to the benefits of cooperation and mutual assistance ... or just that they have already had a look at us and written us off as not worth contacting :)

But I agree, they are likely to be so far away that nothing short of gravity-radio (or something based on the Pauli principle perhaps) will enable contact.



* not spelled priniciple despite the persistent attempts of this stupid software to 'correct' it to that :(