As some of you already pointed out, the universe (at least our universe) is far from being "friendly" to life. But that is actually not my whole topic for discussion.
Personally, I am afraid the NYT has been a bit to liberal with this editorial. I am not aware of how much viable physics reasoning could a professor of natural philosophy (Mr. Davies) carry, but anyhow I would strongly disagree with his claims of live being nonexistent under different dimensional and physical conditions. If you take our rather narrow, egocentric, 3D based definition of life, it is true that this "life" would be rather hard to imagine in let's say a 7D world (how could we even image such a world at all?). But how can any of us, simple creatures who have spent their whole lifes under virtually immutable physical conditions, how can we even attempt to criticize the possibility of life existing in places of various other dimensions and physical laws (considering these would exist at all), when none of us have ever been able to simulate a usefull environment to study such alien conditions.
In this particular discussion, there are too many variables that could be changed or even disposed of to do much logical reasoning. Although I find this a rather interesting topic, it is very hard to talk about having so many unknowns.
If anyone can make any sense of my above ramblings, please reply because I got kinda lost myself...
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As some of you already pointed out, the universe (at least our universe) is far from being "friendly" to life. But that is actually not my whole topic for discussion.
Personally, I am afraid the NYT has been a bit to liberal with this editorial. I am not aware of how much viable physics reasoning could a professor of natural philosophy (Mr. Davies) carry, but anyhow I would strongly disagree with his claims of live being nonexistent under different dimensional and physical conditions.
If you take our rather narrow, egocentric, 3D based definition of life, it is true that this "life" would be rather hard to imagine in let's say a 7D world (how could we even image such a world at all?). But how can any of us, simple creatures who have spent their whole lifes under virtually immutable physical conditions, how can we even attempt to criticize the possibility of life existing in places of various other dimensions and physical laws (considering these would exist at all), when none of us have ever been able to simulate a usefull environment to study such alien conditions.
In this particular discussion, there are too many variables that could be changed or even disposed of to do much logical reasoning. Although I find this a rather interesting topic, it is very hard to talk about having so many unknowns.
If anyone can make any sense of my above ramblings, please reply because I got kinda lost myself...