The Brontothropic Cosmological Principle

Hoisted from Comments: Tjallen writes, apropos of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: About [130] million years ago, there was the Brontothropic principle....

The fundamental constants of the universe must be such to allow the Brontosaurus to live and thrive

[No wait!--T]hey're gone...

Comments

[Rich C]

Brontosaurus is now properly known as apatosaurus, and so this should be the apatothropic principle. Otherwise, an excellent point.

[g]

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

[rev]

It should be called the brontosauric principle - or if Rich C is correct, the apatosauric principle - then.
"anthropic" comes from "anthropos" which means man.

[Paul]

To quote the late Steven J Gould "Bully for Brontosaurus"!

[ex-physicist]

Clever, but wrong. I am not altogether convinced by anthropic principle arguments, but its weaknesses are more subtle.

The argument is that only certain values of the fundamental constants allow complex carbon-based molecules to be stable. Without which there's no life, at least of any sort that anyone's been able to imagine. So humans, dinosaurs, and beetles all rise and fall together.

[Gerhard.Fritz]

1. Isn't that principle just another way of saying "Intelligent Design", meaning He oder She or Whoever created at least part of the universe so that we, His or Her or Whoever's Spitting Image, migth live and prosper there?If so, there is not much space for a rational and scientific discussion. It just falls under freedom of religion. As long as it does not infringe upon the freedom of non-believers.

2. On the other hand, what's wrong - pragmatically speaking, not theoretically - with a little anthropocentrism? As long as we realize that we are part of the world, and hence should try to understand how it works, so that we are able to do our best to not f*ck it up completely - which is, ia a nuthsell, what ecology is about - it doees not hurt. Of course, thinking in terms of geological ages and billions of years, man is just a speck of fly shit. Still, being a living human being and not an extinct aptosaurus has its advantages.

[Neil Craig]

True ex-physicist

Compared to silicon lifeforms, c'thulhu, sentient stars, or even microbes Brontosaurii are close cousins.

However it seems likely that we are fairly close, in cosmological terms, to producing sntient von Neumann machines (self replicating mechanical devices) at which point they will be relatively justified in assuming the universe was constructed to allow them to exist.