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Comment by sinatra | Hacker News Reader

"it provides an answer for how we ended up with a universe with just the right combinations of gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces."

No, we just ended up with a universe with the gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces that we know. That definitely doesn't make it "right." There could (should?) be an infinite combinations of those that would be "right" in other universes.

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Right for sustaining life and that you and I are here and are having this discussion. This isn't a judgement of good or bad (though I'm glad to be here), just accounting for the the odds of arriving at our universe on chance alone. :)

I can't help but think that in 200 years time this sort of meaningless and vapid introspection about the improbability of even existing will have thankfully gone the way of theology.

Said a different way, if you believe in the fine-tuned universe theory, then the multiverse theory would by definition predict our own outcome. It doesn't make either true, rather one of many puzzle pieces that happen to fit together. In 200 years, we may have proof of gravitational waves (or have found none) and many other interesting puzzle pieces that will continue to drive the thinking within quantum mechanics and string theory. Some believe the entire branch of string theory to be philosophy -- though I think this is limited by the belief that because we can't test many of these theories today that we will never find a way to test them in the future.

I've always wondered about something similar: our universe (and our planet) is good for sustaining this specific type of life. But it doesn't mean there won't be any other type of life out there that could have been sustained with something different. Ie. it's possible that any type of universe would have produced life, and when lifeforms from different universes meet, they might not even recognize that it's life

That is a very interesting thought. out very definition of life hinges on the types of life we have seen. So its entirely possible that we may not even recognize other types of life

I also took your right to mean "right for sustaining life," and not as good or bad. However, as NhanH said very eloquently, we are only aware of "our" kind of life. Other lives may be very different, and may not depend on things that our lives do.

This is certainly possible. I should expand my definition as not only sustaining life, but rather avoiding two extremes: one scenario in which all matter repels from all other matter (on an infinite scale) and another in which all matter collapses on itself. These events would seem rather cataclysmic for our universe as a whole, but that could be chalked up to our limited understanding.

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