Good article on anthropic principle

[Flaherty]

As I first learned at a dinner table surrounded by new acquaintances, questioning people’s belief in extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is like questioning their religious faith. Doubts are met with gasps. The fierce stares say not just, "We disagree," but "You have blasphemed."

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against curing cancer, heart disease, and AIDS, which advanced aliens could presumably do. I’d be fascinated to hear an alien’s perspective on the meaning and purpose of life. I’m all for immediate solutions to our war/crime/ poverty problems, which a mature society is supposed to have solved. I even think that receiving all these blessings from above may follow logically from contact with a civilization that’s survived for millions of years. But I also think that astronomers are now in a position to know that our chance of achieving such contact is very small.

Nothing drives ETI faith like the Copernican Principle, the idea that we do not occupy a privileged position in the universe. Many regard this as a necessary axiom for the continued success of the scientific enterprise.



http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0203/articles/heeren.html

 

[Peskanov]

An interesting article; however, it's very biased. Those arguments (large moon, tectonics, etc...) are very old and highly speculative.
It's a bit like understanding the internals a machine and then say that another one performing the same function could work only if built that way.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a few satiric tales about this same theme in his book "The Star Diaries" (1957), and in its followup "Memoirs of a Space Traveler" (1971).
In "Travel 8" Lem makes fun of the origin of life on earth, presenting it as a practical joke made by some drugged ETs who find this planet, with his big moon, as especially inhospitable.
The end part of "Travel 25" presents a conversation between igneous ETs, pondering about the posibility of life in other planets.

Sadly I can't find any extract online to paste here...Anyway, if somebody is curious:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...103-8575726-5054264?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...=sr_1_13/103-8575726-5054264?v=glance&s=books

 

[The idea]

Without our magnetic field, the atmosphere would soon drift out into space.

That's an interesting sentence from the article. Has anyone here heard that before? Can anyone explain why that is true? For example, aren't cold regions of the atmosphere comprised of slow-moving molecules? If some particles of the atmosphere are in orbit around the Earth, then does the magnetic field play an important role in keeping anything else in orbit?

 

[Upchurch]

That's an interesting sentence from the article. Has anyone here heard that before?

That makes no sense. What would the Earth's magnetic field have anything to do with the atmosphere? It's the Earth's gravity that keeps it in place.

Digging a bit more into the website, I found this:

FIRST THINGS is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.

A "religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society"?

 

[Flaherty]

Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould views the intelligence of Homo sapiens "as an ultimate in oddball rarity." The fact that only one species out of an estimated fifty billion developed it on this planet after 3.8 billion years of life suggests that high intelligence may not be the most natural result in the course of evolutionary events.

The same can be said of any species' acute skill, such as the amazing eyesight of the eagle or owl. Are we also to dismiss the idea their eyesight is the product of evolution?

"If intelligence has such high value," says Gould’s Harvard colleague Ernst Mayr, "why don’t we see more species develop it?"

Who says great intelligence has high evolutionary value? Many, many species have lived many, many times longer than humans without a crum's worth of intelligence. Our few hundred thousand years is nothing by comparison. It might be the case that high intelligence is an evolutionary liability if we use it to destroy ourselves. Dumber might be better.

 

[The idea]

The same can be said of any species' acute skill, such as the amazing eyesight of the eagle or owl. Are we also to dismiss the idea their eyesight is the product of evolution?

Well, didn't you just name two species that have keen eyesight? I think the point made in the article is that only one species on this planet has really keen intelligence and that such intelligence may therefore be much rarer in the universe than many suppose.

Who says great intelligence has high evolutionary value? [...] Dumber might be better.

That's why that article was written. It's intended to dumb us down for our own good.