When you go through the long laundry list of things that need to happen for life to emerge in the universe—let alone our Solar System—it’s easy to entertain the idea that maybe the universe is just purpose-built to support intelligent life.
This idea—first proposed by English physicist Brandon Carter in 1973—is known as the “anthropic principle,” or AP, and its purpose is to explore the question of whether the universe we live in is fine-tuned to play host to life. This idea has been formulated a couple different ways over the years. Weak AP asserts that because humans are observing the universe, it must have evolved to support the emergence of intelligent life. Meanwhile, a harder take on the idea says that the universe had no choice but to evolve in a way that intelligent life could emerge. Things get even more philosophical, and even religious, when hard AP advocates invoke a designed purpose to the universe.
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