Want to tamper in God's domain?

[james_davis_nicoll]

MonkeyGod
Program to generate toy universes with different values of four physical constants. Note the emphasis on "toy." This is a very simple program that makes no attempt to generate a universe in detail. Its main purpose is to demonstrate that long-lived stars, which are probably required for the evolution of life, does not depend on some "fine tuning" of the constants of nature but occurs for a wide range of parameters. It also shows that the large number coincidence first proposed by Weyl is not uncommon.

MonkeyGod: The Toy Universe Program.

Comments

[seawasp]

Call me when it gets past "toy".

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Apparently giving subatomic particles masses >1kg where electrons are 900 orders of magnitude more massive than protons, breaks the universe. At least, that's what I assume "-infinity" means.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

On the bright side, it's a lot easier to throw strikes in candlepin bowling.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

It certainly makes the cathode ray tube more interesting.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Ah, one of the drums I beat when I promote (robotic) space exploration: we need to get a good handle on at least the first three or four terms of the Drake equation. Just how common is "life" anyway? One bit I liked in Baxter's Xeelee stories was that you could make it out of anything and the first life in this universe was made out of topological defects in space-time before inflation. Then uncounted kalpas of epochs later (or a few trillionths of a second in chemical time) you get inflation followed by new life in an unimaginably cold and empty universe made out of black hole nucleii binding antimatter . . . followed an inconceivably long time later - after the heat death of everything - by new life made out of quarks in a monstrously huge and attenuated universe all of two light-hours across. . . Bleak as the Xeelee universe is, it crawls and teams with life in every nook and cranny, every epoch and era. Regardless of it's manifold failings in other regards, the Xeelee universe is actually a pretty optimistic setting in which to tell stories.

At the other end of the spectrum, if after 10,000 patient years of interstellar exploration the only life we see is carbon-based water life (no Chloros or silicon-based or nuclear magnetic moment-based varieties), and you only get "higher" eukaryotic life when cellular respiration is based on oxygen, and the only intelligent life we see are modified upright quadrupeds evolved from social animals who spend an immense amount of time caring for their offspring, etc.[1] then the idiosyncratic values of certain basic physical parameters take on a whole lot more significance.

And if after 10,000 years of dedicated effort the only life we see is Earthly, or is the result of Earthly contamination be it life ever so humble? The theologians have a field day ;-)

Seems to me this would be a pretty good reason to have an active presence in space that everyone could get on board with. And not terribly expensive to boot.[2]

[1]It goes without saying that they only achieve high technical civilization capable of space travel if they're economically organized as Capitalists of course. Socialists, Marxists and all that lot are doomed to recurrent savagery interspersed with brief pastorals where cutting-edge technology is the bronze oil lamp. Unless they possess the low cunning to steal it off their betters in which case it is imitative and completely inferior in every respect to the original ;-)

[2]Yeah, I know, we do have such an active program. It's just not American and not crewed by humans.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

You know, I've stopped worrying about how common life is out there, and started wondering why we don't focus more on methods of making it really common. That plus really good cryonics technology or brain digitizing or both could make for some awesome adventures.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

A fine structure constant of 8e16 gives a planet mass of 39kg, approximately equal to my nephew.