gourimoko
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Ok, what’s the answer?
Can you please convince me otherwise? Gravity, Fibonacci, natural log, all this stuff. You think it is just random?
Yes, it's absolutely random.
The answer to this question largely deals with how the universe came into being. The Big Bang and Inflation. The creation of the Universe does not require that all of the material (in the form of matter/radiation) in it at present need exist at the point of or "prior to" the Big Bang. This is where people get confused... They think about the Big Bang as some massive explosion, moving all the material in the Universe outward, but that's not actually an accurate description.
I will try my best to simplify my answer to keep this as concise as possible (which will make this inaccurate, but just trying to be brief here), but to do that we have to understand one trait of "reality" that persists regardless of the topology of empty space, and that trait is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This aspect of reality, loosely means that a total non-existence does not really exist.
That is to say, there is no such thing, and never has been such a thing, as "emptiness" or complete "void." While there was (probably) not a contiguous, spatially and causally connected space-time (a universe) prior to the Big Bang (from our relative perspective at least).
This entails that reality is filled with a constant soup of energy, of debatable proportion, relatively speaking, but we can measure this energy and it has very real-world effects -- yes, it is observable.
This energy, and the variance in it, is sufficient within inflationary cosmology to be the seeding material for a Big Bang and a following Inflationary epoch.
This inflationary effect is a runaway process, where, you end up with spatially and causally connected regions across an infinite landscape of universes, all with infinitely varying and different physical laws.
From here we need to understand that these regions of vacuum are not necessarily stable. Think of a ball wobbling on a hill with a constantly shifting (in all directions) wild pushing on it. Eventually, it will fall over the side of the hill and "roll-down." This is an analogy, of course, but it's effectively a phase shift between a higher energy state and a lower energy state. This phase shift is expressed as a massive increase in thermal energy and radiation within the universe and this is where essentially all of the matter and energy in the universe comes from -- not from some pre-Big Bang era.
This isn't magic.. We see this in quantum mechanics ALL THE TIME. It's a fundamental property of reality.
So this is how you (1) get all the matter and energy in the universe, and (2) how the universe seems fine-tuned for life but really isn't. The short-hand answer for #2 is called the Anthropic Principle, but, essentially, life only exists where it can -- so naturally, any observer who can ask the question would find himself in a universe where life could exist. Since all possible universes might exist, it stands to reason that life was/is inevitable somewhere given the natural consequences of inflationary cosmology.
Effectively, it's like a Nomadic Bedouin or a Berber living for generations near an oasis in the desert. Is that really surprising at all? Not really.. They live where it's possible to live. The universe is not fine-tuned, it's simply exceptionally large and completely random.
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