“Why Earth’s History Appears so Miraculous,” a new piece by Peter Brannen for The Atlantic, spins a mind-bending tale of multiverse mystery and cosmic luckiness.
It’s something of a miracle that life on our planet has been left to evolve without fatal interruption for billions of years. Such a long unbroken chain of survival, however unlikely, is necessary for bags of mud and water like ourselves to eventually sit up, and just recently, to wonder how we got here. And like the bullet-riddled—but safe—planes, our planet has survived countless near-fatal blows. There have been volcanic apocalypses, body blows from supersonic space rocks the size of Mount Everest, and ice ages that might have frozen the planet almost to the tropics. Had any of these catastrophes been worse, we wouldn’t be here. But they couldn’t have been worse for precisely that reason.
Brannen weaves this fascinating story with comments from a host of physicists and apocalypse-defying memoirs from Cold War WMD operators. Basically, he asserts how inexplicably incredible it is that, between the enormous danger of the universe and our own solar system, compounded by the danger humanity poses to its own survival via nuclear weapons, it is truly “miraculous” we have survived this long.
One of his possible conclusions is simply that we are unspeakably lucky. For the very fact that we are here to think about our survival indicates that we are among the few—the only?—species to make it this far.
Perhaps the chances of life-capable planets being destroyed is actually quite high.
Perhaps the likelihood of sufficiently intelligent species annihilating themselves is larger than we think.
And perhaps the most probable thing is that we should all be dead—or should have never been.
In light of all those perhapses, maybe the only thing that makes sense is that we have been supremely fortunate thus far. We have flipped heads a million times in a row, but the next flip, like every one before, is still fifty-fifty.
It truly is an article worth reading. Pay attention to its content, but also to its universe-sized omission. For any theist, this will be the most obvious thing about the piece.
In all this talk of infinite universes, Schrodinger’s cat, “quantum hell,” apocalypse and “Creation,” even “miracles,” the story is begging for divinity—and at the same time willfully neglecting it. The elephant is bigger than the room, and yet it cannot be mentioned—except by exciting postulations about ultimate AI and infinite multiverses.
There is not one mention of God. At least not by that name. And yet the article is entirely—I don’t know what other word to use—religious.
I think this is the problem so many unbelievers must face. Our intelligence is constantly confounded. We do our best to erase the supernatural. And while there is nothing at all wrong with hypotheses about multiple universes and statistical improbabilities, we must always come back to the basic questions of reality: why, what then, and, in this case, when does our supernaturalizing of the natural simply become codewords for God?
I really enjoyed this post. There is so much mystery in the world and if we have eyes to see it, we will see the almighty hand of God behind it all. Thanks for pointing out the unsaid/unseen. You have a gift for it!