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The Privileged Planet

Although this documentary is promoting “intelligent design” view I decided to post it. For centuries scientists and philosophers have marveled at an eerie coincidence. Mathematics, a creation of human reason, can predict the nature of the universe, a fact physicist Eugene Wigner referred to as the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences.” In the last three decades astronomers and cosmologists have noticed another, seemingly unrelated, mystery. Contrary to all expectations, the laws of physics seem precisely “fine-tuned” for the existence of complex life.

Could these two wonders actually be isolated pieces of a wider pattern? Both are prerequisites for science, yet what about the process of scientific discovery itself? What are its necessary conditions? Why is it even possible? Read any book on the history of science, and you’ll learn about magnificent tales of human ingenuity, persistence, and dumb luck. But that’s only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Our location is much more critical to science than it is to real estate. For some reason our Earthly location is extraordinarily well suited to allow us to peer into the heavens and discover its secrets.

Elsewhere, you might learn that Earth and its local environment provide a delicate, and probably exceedingly rare, cradle for complex life. But there’s another, even more startling, fact, described in The Privileged Planet: those same rare conditions that produce a habitable planet-that allow for the existence of complex observers like ourselves-also provide the best overall place for observing. What does this mean? At the least, it turns our view of the universe inside out. The universe is not “pointless” (Steven Weinberg), Earth merely “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,” (Carl Sagan) and human existence “just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents” (Steven Weinberg). On the contrary, the evidence we can uncover from our Earthly home points to a universe that is designed for life, and designed for discovery.

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  1. On Cosmic timescales Humans have been around about a second,yet they have made out the entire Universe and its full history is all about them. This hubris is astonishing even on a universal scale.We are a Speck of dust in a huge Cosmos and have inhabited barely a millenia of our Solar Years.Our distance from our star may just right for eclipses now but for the majority of time it wasnt and wont be.Same with the distance of the moon.We anthropomorphise everything.99% of all life has already died and thats a lot of people but also millions of other forms of life on this one planet and none of them were aware of modern times.But we are not pointless or meaningless,we have taken huge scientific leaps,technological advances and are now reaching out into the Cosmos.We give ourselves meaning.Nature gives us life and the Cosmos gives us a Space and a very brief period of Time.Enjoy it.

  2. hey want to spread propaganda of evolution being a fact rather than a
    theory, to make people stupid and feel like insignificant monkeys so
    they can be controlled better. any person with good intelligence and
    basic understanding of math and physics MUST admit that all of this was
    not created by chances, because the chance of that happening is less
    than 10-to-he-minus-100 %, so young people nowdays have been brainwashed
    to think they are smart if they simply believe in evolution blindly and
    shit on every other intelligent theory that actually makes more sense
    like intelligent design and is supported by tons of evidence such as
    pyramids, alien skulls, ancient tablets describing alien gods, and
    mathematical probabilities…

  3. This documentary proves my theory that the planet Earth is a living being ,not just a planet by which all the right variations are present for complex life.but the Earth is a feeling;intelligent being unto its self.

  4. Why should a doco be avoided because it deals with a topic that may be under the radar or even outré? I think its importantant that we need to be given the chance to see and decide about intelligent design, to ponder the esistance of god/s, or are these intelligent designers something more ethereal., or are we just here, efectively by random chance/mistake

    • because they want to spread propaganda of evolution being a fact rather than a theory, to make people stupid and feel like insignificant monkeys so they can be controlled better. any person with good intelligance and basic understanding of math and physics MUST admit that all of this was not created by chances, because the chacnce of that happening is less than 10-to-he-minus-100 %, so young people nowdays have been brainwashed to think they are smart if they simply believe in evolution blindly and shit on every other intelligant theory that actually makes more sense like intelligant design and is supported by tons of evidence such as pyramids, alien skulls, ancient tablets describing alien gods, and mathematical probabilities…