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The universe is heading toward a state of maximal entropy; when it reaches that state, known as “thermal equilibrium”, all life processes will be impossible. If you imagine all the possible ways of arranging stuff in the universe, an extremely high proportion of them would put the universe in thermal equilibrium immediately. Life is only possible (for a while – it will eventually run down) because our universe luckily started out very far from thermal equilibrium, with extremely low entropy, 14 billion years ago, for some unknown reason.
So, given that almost all ways of assigning values to the universe’s parameters would be unfriendly to life, why does the universe in fact have life-friendly parameters?
The initial entropy of the universe was ridiculously low. According to the traditional Big Bang theory, the universe originated in a giant explosion about 14 billion years ago. At its beginning, the universe had an incredibly low entropy. According to one estimate, if you randomly picked a possible initial state for a universe, the probability of picking one with such a low entropy is about 1 in ten to the power of ten to the power of 124. The low initial entropy, in turn, is crucial to explaining life and everything else in the universe that we care about.
Eh, the counter to this argument is that in reality there are 10^10^124 (or more) different universes out there and we're just present in the one that's suitable for life.
It reminds me of the old football "oracle" scam where the scammer sends you the outcome of a future football match via post and gets it right. Then he sends you another one and gets it right again. And then again 5 more times. After 7 matches of getting it right in a row he sends a message saying: "Clearly I've demonstrated my football prediction abilities with a less than 1% change of this happening at random, if you want the results of the next match (to bet on etc.) send me $1,000". The poor victim is convinced by this and sends over $1,000 only to get a prediction that's no better than anyone else's.
The trick here is that the scammer sends out the initial message to 128 different people, half getting told Team A is going to win, and half Team B. If Team A actually wins he continues sending messages to the first half of people, otherwise he sticks with the second half (since the ones he sent the wrong prediction to are never going to believe his prediction powers now). He then splits this group into half and tells half of them that Team C are going to win and half that Team D are going to win etc. etc.
After 7 rounds of this he's down to his victim who's the (un)lucky dude who the scammer sent all 7 correct predicitons to. This person then thinks he's dealing with someone who can actually predict football game outcomes with >99% probability and is much more likely to part with his money, only to get a rude surprise afterwards...
The oracle scam has been my favorite scam since I first saw it on a Square One Mathnet episode decades ago.
It was also a case solved by The Bloodhound Gang on 3-2-1 Contact.
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Yeah, it's a particularly nasty scam, considering that the biggest portion of the loss to the victim doesn't even come from the scammer, it comes from losing money to the betting shop (clearly if you paid $x to the scammer you're gonna bet enough to make at least that much money back).
And if the scammer gets the prediction right he gets to repeat the whole procedure with you, asking for even more money this time around since now it's even less likely in the eyes of the victim the scammer is making things up, causing him to bet even more money on the next match until it all fails spectacularly and the victim loses a shit ton of money.
Honestly the best case scenario for the victim here is that he loses the very first bet he puts on based on the scammer's advice and get wise to what's going on rather than having a succession of ever larger bets that eventually wipe him out completely.
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Why do you think the multiverse exists?
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