Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by scarmig 1612 days ago
One nice thing about 1) is that it is more falsifiable than 2). 2) basically gives us the ability to explain any almost arbitrarily unlikely event (at least unless we figured out a lower bound on the space time curvature of the observable universe). You might as well say that life is vanishingly unlikely but a series of vanishingly unlikely many-worlds quantum coincidences happened to result in the particular universe we see.
1 comments

There is a sort of philosophical upper bound on the total size of the Universe in an eternal-inflation scenario. This is the Boltzmann brain paradox. The argument goes that if there are infinitely many universes it is infinitely more likely for you to be a brain randomly fluctuating into existence in the vacuum, rather than being an actual human being evolved through evolution.

This conclusion is obviously absurd, so the argument goes that there can't be infinitely many places in which random things can happen in the Universe. Note that the size of the Universe required to produce a Boltzman brain is much larger than that discussed in the article. It's still nice to think that there might be an upper bound for us to avoid some of the more daunting implications of the anthropic principle.