Does science suggest humans have a cosmic role?

If it is possible that we are alone, or at least alone as far as we know, for thousands or tens of thousands of years, then it is possible we are not cosmically ordinary. Intelligence could be very rare. Stephen Hawking, voicing the opinion of many of my colleagues, also said, “I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.” He spoke accurately: This is his belief—a personal feeling, based in part on believing that we can’t possibly be anything but ordinary—a “chemical scum.” I have my beliefs too, but let’s put them aside. All the observations so far are consistent with the idea that humanity might not be common. Moreover, we are unlikely to find out one way or the other for millennia, so this conclusion will remain a distinct possibility for a long time. I call this the Misanthropic Principle.

The second dramatic discovery is usually called the Anthropic Principle. The laws of the universe include fundamental numbers like the strengths of the four forces, the speed of light, Planck’s constant, the masses of electrons or protons, and others. Neither my physicist colleagues nor I have any idea why they take these particular values. They could be anything! But we do know that if those values were slightly different, even by a few percent, we would not be here. Carbon atoms could not exist, for example, or the sun might only burn for millions instead of billions of years. Life, much less intelligent life, could not exist. The most extreme example of precision are the parameters of the big bang creation for which it is estimated even an infinitesimal change would preclude life. This remarkable situation of fine-tuning has been carefully considered for decades. Barrow and Tipler’s exhaustive book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, is one of many detailing these “coincidences.” That the universe appears to be fantastically finely tuned for intelligent life is not particularly controversial, and is the second piece of evidence related to the end of Copernican Mediocrity. But, you might ask, why is the universe so perfect?

Good question. There are so far only three kinds of answers from science. One is just dumb luck. The second answer, proffered and defended by most of my theoretically minded colleagues, is the multiverse: There are an infinite number of universes spanning all logical possibilities. We just live in the one we can. The third answer touches on philosophy, and comes from quantum mechanics. (If you have taken any modern physics course, it is likely you will have heard this notion before.) Matter is composed of wave functions of probability that only become “real entities” when they are measured by a conscious observer. The quantum mechanical pioneer, John Wheeler, is one of several thinkers who have proposed that the unusual nature of the universe suggests it had to evolve conscious beings in order to become real.