Although The Privileged Planet encourages intelligent design, I decided to publish it anyway. For centuries, scientists and philosophers have marveled at an eerie coincidence. Mathematics is a creation of human reason that can predict the nature of the universe, and physicist Eugene Wigner called it the unreasonable validity of mathematics in science. Over the past three decades, astronomers and cosmologists have noticed another seemingly unrelated mystery. To everyone’s surprise, the laws of physics seem to apply just fine for the existence of complex life.
Could these two miracles really be isolated pieces of a larger pattern? Both are prerequisites for science, but what about the process of scientific discovery itself? What are its prerequisites? Why is it possible? Read any book on the history of science and you’ll learn great stories about human ingenuity, perseverance, and luck. But that’s only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Our location is more important to science than real estate. For some reason, our place on Earth is perfect for us to gaze at the sky and discover its mysteries.
Elsewhere, you might learn that Earth and its local environment are fragile and possibly extremely rare cradles of complex life. But there’s another, even more startling fact, described in “Privileged Planets”: The rare conditions that create habitable planets — which allow complex observers like ours to exist — also provide the best overall observations point. what does that mean? At the very least, it upends our view of the universe. The universe is not “meaningless” (Steven Weinberg), the Earth is just “a lonely blob in the cosmic darkness” (Carl Sagan), and human existence “is just a chain of accidents more or less Absurd results” (Stefan Weinberg). Instead, the evidence we can find from our home planet Earth points to a universe designed for life and discovery.
