Category Archives: Cosmos

First Law of Planetary Building

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First Law of Planetary Building: no two planets will ever be alike.

Corollary #1: if two planets are almost identical, then at least one of them will have at least one outrageously peculiar feature.

Corollary #2: Universes made of perfectly identical planets are not allowed.

The First Law is manifest in the fact that each planet in the Solar System and elsewhere appears to be a unique, very specific experiment with peculiar conditions that are never repeated elsewhere. Even single satellites are all very different from one another. And if you want to top strangeness, how about Corot-7b with its clouds of minerals?

Mineral clouds

Mineral clouds

One objection could be raised about Venus and Earth, or Uranus and Neptune, as both couples look like made of identical twins. However, Venus’s hellish atmosphere and very slow, retrograde rotation are truly outrageously peculiar features; and Uranus basically lies to one side (hence corollary #1).

Corollary #2 is necessary otherwise the First Law is invalidated. It seems plausible, since the number of universes is large but not infinite.

Why We Are Here

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The Total Perspective Vortex [...] shows its victim the entire
unimaginable infinity of the universe [...] in an infinite
universe the one thing sentient life cannot afford to
have is a sense of proportion.

Just as a painter with a canvas, colors, brushes and inspiration is ipso facto bound to paint: so the Creator, having the capabilities and tools created the cosmos. And with no configuration preferred over another, the Creator painted all possible canvasses, and everything that could exist came into existence.

And so here we are, existing because we could.

And many, ever more different copies of ourselves exist in this Cosmos, but in other Universes, covering all the possibilities even beyond our imagination. Each one of them, existing only if but also every time it could.

In the big scheme of things, the existence of each one of us is thus even more irrelevant that anybody has ever dreamed of. But from each one of us’ point of view, it’s all we have: and so in a paradox, it is extremely important, just because such an existence is so singularly precious only to itself, and to a handful of otherwise just as irrelevant people.

and you know that these are the days of our lives
remember

The Perfect Cosmological Principle, or The Cosmology of the Ecclesiastes

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While analyzing the consequences of modelling the Cosmos as a collection of a huge number of Parallel Universes, I wrote some 18 months ago:

[...] We have learned that our planet is not the Center of the Universe. Apart from being able to harbor life, Earth is a run-of-the-mill planet in an average star in a not-so-special galaxy, belonging to an ordinary Local Group gravitationally linked to a Supergroup like many others, in a corner of the Universe that is not extraordinary at all

Let’s call that the “Banality Principle”, with us since at least since the times of Copernicus [...]

As it happens, it is called the Copernican Principle indeed.

It is already quite important as it is, since it means we can investigate physics in our own vicinity and assume that the laws we observe are the same throughout the Universe.

There is another step usually missed though: if we just expand the Copernican Principle to include time, then the hypothesis is that then the same things will keep happening.

This is the so-called Perfect Cosmological Principle, rejected in the past because undermined by the overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang, a”Beginning” and therefore a “special Time” in the Universe.

However, this argument fails in in a Multiverse Cosmos, where the Big Bang is just one of many. If that is the case then, the Ecclesiastes may very well be right:

1,9: The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun