Book Looks at the Universe's Many Royal Flushes

The fascinating question of cosmic fine-tuning has been given a very impressive and comprehensive treatment in the recent book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos by astrophysics professor Geraint F. Lewis and astronomy postdoctoral researcher Luke A. Barnes. The book looks at the many ways in which our universe seems to have improbably “hit the jackpot” or “won the lotto,” having a series of incredibly lucky breaks that were necessary for our eventual existence. On page 29 the authors describe the thesis of a fine-tuned universe like this: “The claim is that small changes in the free parameters of the laws of nature as we know them have dramatic, uncompensated, and detrimental effects on the ability of the universe to support the complexity needed for physical life forms.” 

One case involves the existence of abundant carbon and oxygen in the universe, two elements that must exist in abundance for life to exist. Carbon and oxygen didn't exist in the early history of the universe, which was almost entirely hydrogen and helium. Carbon and oxygen were formed gradually by stars. A great deal of luck is required for any universe to be able to produce either carbon or oxygen; and for a universe to produce abundant amounts of both carbon and oxygen, some fantastically improbable strokes of luck are required. The authors note this on pages 118-119 (referring to the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atom):

If we nudge the strength of the strong force upwards by just 0.4 per cent, stars produce a wealth of carbon, but the route to oxygen is cut off. While we have the central element to support carbon-based life, the result is a universe in which there will be very little water. Decreasing the strength of the strong force by a similar 0.4 per cent has the opposite effect: all carbon is rapidly transformed into oxygen, providing the universe with plenty of water, but leaving it devoid of carbon.

Protons and neutrons are made up of smaller particles called quarks. A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is made of two down quarks and one up quark. On page 50 to 51 of the Fortunate Universe book, we are told some reasons why a life-bearing universe requires that these quark particles have masses not too far from the mass they have. If the down quark was about 70 times more massive or the up quark was about 130 times more massive, there would be only one element, and complex chemistry would be impossible. More sensitively, if the up quark was more than six times more massive, protons could not exist, and there would be no atoms. But later we learn of a much more sensitive requirement demanding that the quark masses be almost exactly as they are in order for the universe to be hospitable for life.

Reiterating the conclusions of this scientific paper, the book also notes on page 120 that we would not have a universe with abundant carbon and oxygen if the quark masses were different by much more than a few per cent. The book notes how improbable such a case of “hitting the distant bulls-eye” was:

And remember from last chapter that because the quarks are already “absurdly light” in the words of physicist Leonard Susskind, a range of mass that is a small percentage of their value in our Universe corresponds to a tiny fraction of their possible range. It is about one part in a million relative to the Higgs field, which gives them their mass. It is about one part in 10²³ relative to the Planck mass!

On page 75 of the book we have a diagram that is basically the same as the diagram below from an article by one of the authors. The author shows that if you make random values for the strong nuclear force and a fundamental constant called the fine structure constant, then only a very tiny fraction will allow carbon-based life. Because the graph uses a logarithmic scale, it visually exaggerates the size of the tiny white rectangle. If you were to program a computer to assign random numbers for these two (the strong nuclear force and the fine structure constant) between 0 and 1000, less than one in a million times would the numbers end up within the tiny white rectangle. 

From Barnes article here

On page 63 the book has a discussion of fine-tuning involving the Higgs mass and Higgs boson:

Life requires a value not too much different to what we observe. There must be an as yet unknown mechanism that slices off the contributions from the quantum vacuum, reducing it down to the observed value. This slicing has to be done precisely, not too much and not so little as to destabilize the rest of particles. This is a cut as fine as one part in 10¹⁶...This problem – known as the hierarchy problem – keeps particle physicists awake at night.

On page 111 of the book we are told about some ways in which the strong nuclear force is sensitive to changes:

A small decrease in the strength of the strong force by about 8 per cent would render deuterium unstable. A proton can no longer stick to a neutron, and the first nuclear reaction in stars is in danger of falling apart. An increase of 12 per cent binds the diproton – a proton can stick to another proton. This gives stars a short cut, an easy way to burn fuel. If the diproton were suddenly bound within the Sun, it would burn hydrogen at a phenomenal rate, exhausting its fuel in mere moments.

So many royal flushes

Then there is the cosmological constant problem, the case of fine-tuning discussed here. It's the issue that quantum field theory predicts that ordinary space should be very densely packed with quantum energy, making it even denser than steel. But somehow we live in a universe that has only the tiniest sliver of the vacuum density that it should have. Below is what page 162 of the book has to say about this:

Maybe there is a mechanism at work here, a mechanism that we clearly don't yet understand, which trims the energy in the quantum vacuum; so, while it is intrinsically very large, the value we observe, the value that influences the expansion of the universe, appears to be much, much smaller. But this would have to be a very precise razor, trimming off 10¹²⁰ but leaving the apparently tiny amount that we observe....But what if this mechanism for suppressing the influence of the cosmic vacuum energy was not so efficient, removing the effect of 10¹¹⁹ rather than 10¹²⁰, so there would be ten times the vacuum energy density we actually measure? Remember, such vacuum energy accelerates the expansion faster and faster, emptying out the Universe, cutting off the possibility of stars, planets, and eventually people.

Towards the end of the book, the authors discuss some common objections made to minimize the importance of such conclusions. One objection goes like this: improbable things happen all the time (for example, there was only 1 chance in a billion that you would have the 9-digit Social Security number that you have). The objection is easily dismissed on these grounds: improbable things do happen all the time, but improbable lucky things do not happen all the time. The cases of cosmic fine-tuning are not merely improbable things happening, but incredibly improbable lucky things happening; and it is not at all true that incredibly improbable lucky things happen all the time.

Another objection appeals to the existence of a multiverse: maybe there are an infinity of universes, and in such a case the odds of one of them being successful might be good. This is not a sound objection because it merely increases the number of random trials; and increasing the number of random trials does nothing to increase the chance of any one random trial succeeding. If you drive into Las Vegas and drive out with $50,000,000 in your car, that's an astonishing piece of luck; and it's no less astonishing if there are an infinity of such lucky winners scattered across an infinity of universes in which an infinity of different things happen. Adding a multiverse does not increase the odds of lucky events in any one particular universe such as ours.

In so many different ways (physics, cosmology, biology) the universe seems to scream at us in a thundering voice: “Purpose and non-randomness!” But all this falls on the deaf ears of many experts in academia who keep summarizing things by telling us, “It's all just randomness.”

Is Our Universe More Improbable Than a “Boltzmann Modern Earth” ?

Cosmologists sometimes discuss a possibility called a Boltzmann brain. A Boltzmann brain is the hypothetical possibility of a brain forming somewhere in space from an incredibly unlikely random combination of particles. Some have tried to explain the very unlikely existence of our universe by using reasoning along these lines: don't be surprised to be an observer in a universe like ours, because observers can only exist in universes like ours. But the possibility of a Boltzmann brain is sometimes presented to rebut such reasoning.

Let's consider two possibilities. In the first case, you live in a universe that is 99.9999% disorderly and chaotic, but there is just a tiny little area of space that is highly orderly, just orderly enough for your brain to exist. In the second case, you live in a universe that is orderly for vast regions stretching billions of light-years, with enough order to allow the possibility of trillions of life-bearing planets. Our reality is the second of these cases. But some cosmologists have argued that from a thermodynamic standpoint and an entropy standpoint, a "blind chance" standpoint, it is inconceivably more probable that you should find yourself as an observer under the first of these two cases.

Another possibility to consider (rather similar to a Boltzmann brain) is what we may call a “Boltzmann modern Earth.” This is the incredibly unlikely possibility that a planet the size of Earth, with all of the complexity and biology of our planet, could arise fairly suddenly from a random combination of particles.

This possibility of a "Boltzmann modern Earth" is discussed by ace cosmologist Roger Penrose in his recent scientific book Fashion Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. On page 316 of his book, he says, “One can make a very rough estimate of the probability that life, as it now exists on Earth, with all its detailed molecular and atomic locations and motions, came about simply by chance encounters from particles coming in from space in, let us say, six days!” Penrose then estimates that such a thing would have a probability of about 1 in 10 to the ten to the sixtieth power. That is a probability not anything like the microscopic probability of 1 in 10⁶⁰ but instead an almost infinitely smaller probability. It's the probability you would have if you started out with one tenth and then kept multiplying by one tenth a total number of times equal to a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times.

But then Penrose tells us that this fantastically unlikely event (a life-filled Earth like ours suddenly forming from random collisions of particles) would be far more probable than the existence of a universe as orderly as ours, saying it “would be a far 'cheaper' way of producing intelligent beings than the way in which it was actually done!” He's indicating  that the incredibly improbable sudden formation of a “Boltzmann modern Earth” would actually be much more likely than the chance of you getting a universe such as ours accidentally.

Speaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Penrose states this on page 317:

The lower-entropy earlier states of the universe that initially gave rise to humanity in its earliest stages (being of lower entropy simply by virtue of the 2^nd law) must have been far more improbable (in this sense) than is the situation now. This is just the 2^nd law in action. So it must be “cheaper” (in terms of improbabilities) for the state to have come about as it is now purely by chance, than for it to have arisen from an earlier much lower entropy state – if that had come about purely by chance!

And on page 313 Penrose states that “the improbability of the universe conditions that we actually seem to find ourselves in” is roughly 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 124^th power, which is a probability almost infinitely smaller than the 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 60^th power estimate he made for the chance of a planet with all of Earth's biology appearing suddenly from random particle collisions (a “Boltzmann modern Earth” occurring). This 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 124^th power probability is the probability you would have if you started out with one tenth and then kept multiplying by one tenth a total number of times equal to ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times.

Why such a low probability? The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that entropy must steadily increase. But right now the entropy of the universe is fairly low. Situations such as solar systems surrounded by vast amounts of empty space are very low entropy situations (as opposed to a universe that is a uniform sea of particles, which is high in entropy). It seems that if the universe has the low entropy it now has after 14 billion years of existence, the entropy of the universe must have been staggeringly low at the time of the Big Bang. And from a thermodynamic standpoint, such a thing seems insanely unlikely.

Penrose is one of the most well-known cosmologists around. If his statements on this topic are correct, then we have perhaps a tremendous irony. Centuries ago, people argued that our planet and its life could only have appeared if there were some higher power in the universe, on the grounds that it was too improbable that so much order could arise by chance. Now after all our advanced science, much of it done by people wishing to overturn such a conclusion, we may have discovered that the chance of this type of order existing randomly by chance (considering the history of the universe, the Big Bang, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is not greater than was imagined long ago, but actually very much smaller.

The 5 Greatest Moments in the History of the Universe

I looked to see whether I could find a good list of the 10 greatest moments of human history, but I was disappointed. I found one bizarre list of the 10 greatest moments of human history, which included the atomic bombings that ended World War II and Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany (hardly what I consider great moments). Then there was another list which counts long periods of time as “moments,” which doesn't make sense. Then there was a list of “Ten Moments That Changed History” which included the invention of porridge (hardly what I consider a great moment).

Perhaps I should try to correct this Internet list shortcoming by trying to write a first-rate list of the ten greatest moments in human history. But instead I'll try something more ambitious: I'll take a stab at making a list of the five greatest moments in the history of the universe. I will consider our entire vast universe of billions of galaxies, and ask: what five moments should be considered the greatest moments in its 13-billion-year history? For this discussion, a moment will be considered as something that occurred within a very short time span. This means items such as “the origin of consciousness” or “the origin of the first technology” or “the first development of science” will have to be excluded, as they apparently did not occur at one particular moment of time.

1. The Big Bang

The first choice on the list is an obvious one. Any list of the greatest moments in the history of the universe must include the universe's first moment, the mysterious event known as the Big Bang that occurred about 13 billion years ago. According to scientists, at the time of the Big Bang, the entire universe began to expand from an infinitely dense mathematical point known as the primordial singularity. It's hard to beat that for drama and significance, particularly since the existence of everyone depended on it going just right (scientists say that if there had been a very slightly different Big Bang, none of us would be here).

2. The First Origin of Life Anywhere in the Universe

I cannot include the origin of the first galaxy or the origin of the first planet or the first star in my list of the universe's five greatest moments, as they each occurred very gradually over a period of many years. So to find the next item on the list, I must fast-forward billions of years, to the time when microscopic life first appeared in our universe. Which planet had the honor of being the first planet on which life appeared? Almost certainly it was not our planet. Given that there are billions of galaxies, the first planet on which life appeared was almost certainly not even a planet revolving around a star in our galaxy. It was probably a planet in some other galaxy, and the first origin of life in the universe probably occurred billions of years before life originated on our planet.

Such an event of fundamental importance must have been completely unrecorded. Given the vastness of the universe, it is very, very unlikely that anyone will ever be able to figure out what was the first planet on which life originated.

3. The First Interplanetary or Interstellar Communication Between Civilizations

Another moment in the universe's history that deserves a place on my list is the first moment in the history of the universe when two civilizations existing on different planets were ever able to establish communication. Such an event may have first occurred when two civilizations existing in different solar systems were able to achieve radio communication with each other (something that is much, much easier than making contact by an interstellar voyage). Or it might have been that the first two civilizations on different planets to communicate with each other may have been planets within a single solar system.

Given the vast age of the universe, such an event very likely occurred long, long ago, probably millions or billions of years ago.

4. The First Interstellar Voyage Reaching Another Star

Another great moment in the universe's history must have been the first time that a spaceship from one solar system was ever able to reach another solar system. The distance between stars is so great that it is very difficult to estimate how often interstellar travel occurs. There could be some special physics that allows interstellar travel to occur commonly. Or perhaps there is no such physics, and interstellar travel only occurs rarely, because of the enormous costs and great lengths of time needed for the journey between stars. But very probably some civilization in the universe has launched a spacecraft that has successfully traveled from one solar system to another. The first time any such spacecraft ever reached another solar system might be considered one of the greatest moments in the history of the universe. 

It might have looked like this

5. The First Interplanetary Physical Contact Between Different Intelligent Species

Another great moment in the universe's history was the first time that intelligent creatures on one planet ever made face-to-face physical contact with intelligent creatures on some other planet, creatures belonging to some entirely different species. This might have been something like a “handshake across the stars,” when an intelligent species in one solar system traveled to a planet in some other solar system, after crossing the vast interstellar void. Or, it might have been something requiring a much shorter voyage. If two planets in a solar system ever developed intelligent life at about the same time, the first interplanetary physical contact between different species might have been merely a case of astronauts from one planet traveling to another planet in the same solar system. Given the great age of the universe, it is likely that this event has already occurred, although we will never know which case of direct contact between different intelligent species was the first such event to occur in the universe's history. Such an event might have occurred after many different interstellar voyages looking to find another intelligent species. 

We are used to being able to see many of the greatest moments in human history on our television screens, either by looking at photography of the event taken while it happened, or by looking at historical documentaries that describe the event very well. But the last four items on this list will forever be shrouded in mystery. Because of the incredible vastness of a universe consisting of billions of galaxies (each made up of millions or billions of stars), we will never be able to say, “This was the planet where life first evolved in the universe,” or “This was the time when two intelligent beings from different planets first stood face-to-face.” Just as our universe keeps most of its “firsts” hidden, it also keeps most of its superlatives hidden. There's no way to tell what is the biggest planet in the universe or the fastest spaceship in the universe or the biggest city in the universe or the coldest planet in the universe. Even if you restricted yourself to only trying to keep track of the superlatives or firsts of a single galaxy, the job of being a galactic Guinness would be a very, very difficult one.

The Most Interesting Universe Imaginable

Our Mathematical Universe is a book by MIT physicist Max Tegmark. But a more appropriate title would be My Fantasies About Other Universes. Tegmark has long been a popularizer of the idea that our universe is only one of a huge or infinite set of universes called a multiverse. Tegmark distinguishes between 4 types of multiverses, which he calls Level I, Level II, Level III, and Level IV. Tegmark says he is a believer in a Level IV multiverse. He describes a Level IV multiverse as one consisting of a vast or infinite number of universes, each of which has a different mathematical structure. This is not science, but unverifiable metaphysics dressed up in scientific garb. 

Tegmark gives some reasoning to support his belief in a Level IV multiverse, but it is not persuasive. He claims that a belief in a Level IV multiverse follows from the “mathematical universe hypothesis,” which he defines as the idea that “our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.” He defines a mathematical structure as “a set of abstract entities with relations between them.”

But this mathematical universe hypothesis is not a sound one. The universe is not a mathematical structure, because it is not a set of abstract entities. A mind can create various abstract entities when pondering the universe, but such abstract entities are not the same as the universe itself.

Consider a much simpler question: is our planet a mathematical structure? No, it is not. Our planet has the shape of a sphere, which is a mathematical structure. But our planet is vastly more than just a sphere, as a description of our planet would involve a vast number of details beyond that of a sphere. Just as it incorrect to say that our planet is a mathematical structure, it is incorrect to say that the universe itself is a mathematical structure.

Tegmark attempts to prove his mathematical universe hypothesis by arguing that it follows from an “external reality hypothesis,” which he defines as the hypothesis that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. But such a mathematical universe hypothesis in no way follows from such an external reality hypothesis, and Tegmark's reasoning that the one follows from the other is not at all convincing.

Tegmark gives an example of a chess match in an attempt to persuade us that everything can be reduced to a mathematical structure. He points out that we can reduce the chess match to an abstraction listing each piece and how it moved. But even this example fails. Even a chess match cannot be reduced to an abstract mathematical structure. To get the full story on what went on in a chess match, we must have not just the movement of the pieces, but the mind stream of the players: what exactly they were thinking at each point in the game, and what exactly they were feeling. There is no way to represent such streams of thought and feeling through an abstract mathematical representation. Even if one considers only physical things, you then have to consider that according to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, all subatomic particles have a quantum fuzziness, meaning that they cannot be defined exactly in terms of both movement and position, unlike chess pieces on a chess board. You cannot even make a precise exact mathematical description of the arrangement of all the particles in your body.

Being something composed of almost infinitely diverse forms of matter that are widely separated, and also streams of experience and consciousness that cannot be mathematically represented, there is no mathematical structure that corresponds to the universe. Saying as Tegmark does that the universe is a mathematical structure is to make the same kind of mistake as saying that an office building is a blueprint or saying that an automobile is a 3D CAD model (or saying that a C++ object is a C++ class).

Tegmark has introduced the idea of the universe as a mathematical structure so that he can use the idea as a kind of a springboard to a multiverse theory. The idea has long been held that every type of mathematical structure exists in some eternal Platonic sense. For example, it has been held that there has eternally existed the idea of a triangle, the idea of a square, and so forth, going up to a figure with a countless number of sides. So Tegmark basically reasons that if our universe is a mathematical structure, and if every mathematical structure is real, then there must exist every imaginable universe that corresponds to each of the different possible mathematical structures. But this reasoning fails to persuade, simply because Tegmark fails to establish the unwarranted idea that our universe is a mathematical structure, an idea which has not received appreciable support from previous thinkers.

One can only ask: why does Max Tegmark have such an enthusiasm for multiverse theory? I think I have a possible explanation. Perhaps Tegmark wants to believe in many other universes because he thinks that our universe is very boring.

Why do I suggest that Tegmark thinks our universe is boring? Part of the reason is given in the last chapter of Tegmark's book. Tegmark argues that we are alone in our vast universe. He gives the same lame argument that has been advanced by Ray Kurzweil and others, the argument that if there were intelligent life elsewhere it would already have colonized our solar system. This argument has been rebutted successfully many times before, including in this post and this post. One reason the argument makes no sense is that intergalactic travel (involving distances of many thousands of light-years) is very probably impossible, and even interstellar travel is very probably extremely difficult (contrary to impressions given by science fiction such as Star Trek and Star Wars). Another reason the argument makes no sense is that there is no large nation on Earth which develops more than 95% of available territory (every large nation keeps a significant fraction of its available territory as undeveloped preserves or nature reserves). So there is no reason to assume that any race would go around colonizing every available planet or solar system.

The fact that we have found so many potentially habitable planets already contradicts Tegmark's thesis that we are alone in the universe, as does the fact that we live in a universe with at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars like the sun.

Credit: Planetary Habitability Laboratory, UPR Arecibo

Believing unwisely in the idea that man is the only intelligent species in the universe, Tegmark therefore believes in a dull desert of a universe, a universe with no beings more interesting than those we read about in our daily news. So we can make a guess as to why he is so attracted to speculations about other universes. It's rather like this. Imagine if you had only one sibling, a brother who was a real snooze, as dull as dishwater. You might be tempted to fantasize that you are adopted, and that you have unseen brothers you have never met, who live terribly exciting lives. But if your brother was an extremely interesting person with a fascinating life, you probably would not engage in such fantasies.

I think we live in a universe vastly more interesting than the very dull affair imagined by Tegmark. Contrary to what Tegmark claims, the evidence from astronomy actually suggests that the universe is teeming with intelligent life. We have every reason to suspect that the history of our universe is the most fascinating drama imaginable, a place where epics of evolution are being played out on trillions of civilized planets existing in billions of galaxies. We also have much evidence to suggest that the universe has a wide variety of fascinating paranormal phenomena which make it far more interesting than any materialist thinker can imagine.

How would you concisely describe such a universe, with such a staggering wealth of locations and phenomena, with such an incredible diversity of intelligent entities, some of which are protoplasmic, some of which may be electronic, and some of which may be purely spiritual? You might call it the most interesting universe imaginable. When you have that type of universe to study and ponder and investigate, why even bother with unverifiable speculations about other universes?

A Critique of Seth Lloyd's Theory of the Universe as Quantum Computer

Seth Lloyd is an MIT professor of mechanical engineering who wrote a book called Programming the Cosmos. Some of the ideas in this book have been stated in a recent scientific paper he wrote entitled The Universe as Quantum Computer. In this paper Lloyd deals with some fascinating ideas, and flirts with some promising lines of thought. But does he come up with a workable conclusion?

I will skip over the first seven sections of this paper, which mainly deal with a discussion of exotic issues in computer science such as universal Turing machines and cellular automata. In section 8 “The Universe as Quantum Computer,” Lloyd leaps to the conclusion that the universe is “observationally indistinguishable from a giant quantum computer,” but does not justify this assertion. For one thing, no one has built a giant quantum computer. For another thing, if we were to build a giant quantum computer, there is no reason to think that it would look anything like our universe of galaxies, stars, and planets. 

Lloyd then asserts, “The ordinary laws of physics tell us nothing about why the universe is so complex.” This is a very serious misstatement which is easy to disprove. In fact, the ordinary laws of physics tell us a great deal about why the universe is so complex. We have large complex objects such as galaxies, stars, and planets largely because of the law of gravitation. We have 100 different types of atoms (and many complex molecules) largely because of the laws of electromagnetism, and the laws of nuclear physics involving the strong nuclear force. We have a stable planet partially because of conservation laws that maintain various types of balances such as the balance between positive charges and negative charges. We have complex life partially because of various complicated laws that allow stable sun-like stars to produce thermonuclear fusion at a slow, steady pace. I could list numerous other examples of laws of physics that help to assure that we have a universe as complicated as ours rather than merely an unordered lifeless soup of particles.

Lloyd then asserts that the known laws of physics can be written on the back of a tee shirt, something that will come as quite the surprise to anyone studying physics in graduate school, who has to lug around 600-page books filled with the complex mathematics and equations of general relatively, nuclear physics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. This page lists or gives links to more than a hundred laws of physics, a much larger list than can be written on the back of a tee shirt.

Lloyd then wonders how the universe got so complicated after the simplicity of the Big Bang, when everything was presumably packed into a simple incredibly hot and incredibly tiny superdense ball. To explain the rise of complexity in the universe (things such as galaxies, planets, and life), Lloyd offers his “quantum computational model of the universe,” which he attempts to explain in terms of typing monkeys.

The story of the typing monkeys is well-known to anyone who has read books on the origin of order in the universe. The idea is that if you have a sufficient number of monkeys typing for a sufficient length of time, they will eventually produce any imaginable literary work. Lloyd imagines monkeys typing text that will be fed into a computer. Purely by chance, Lloyd infers, some of this output would produce a working computer program. Lloyd suggests such a randomly produced program might somehow be responsible for order in our universe.

But where is this computer, and where are the monkeys? Lloyd gives this answer: “In addition, quantum fluctuations – e.g., primordial fluctuations in energy density – automatically provide the random bits that are necessary to seed the quantum computer with a random program. That is, quantum fluctuations are the 14 monkeys that program the quantum computer that is the universe. Such a quantum computing universe necessarily generates complex, ordered structures with high probability.”

Taken literally, this thesis is quite nonsensical.

First, let's look at the primordial quantum density fluctuations mentioned by Lloyd – not his speculations about them, but the basic concept of primordial quantum density fluctuations. Scientists imagine these as incredibly tiny random variations in density that occurred in the early universe. Cosmologists say that such fluctuations would have occurred in the early universe because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. But that law of nature (and its associated physical constant, Planck's constant) set a very specific limit on these fluctuations. According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a quantum fluctuation cannot be greater than about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a joule during any second. A joule is about the energy needed to slide a brick a distance of one meter. So the maximum allowed quantum fluctuation in a second is an amount of energy billions of times smaller than the energy used in a single one-second flash of a firefly.

Given that limit, it is quite nonsensical to imagine quantum fluctuations literally being the source of some randomly produced program that might help to produce order in the universe. Even with random fluctuations occurring all over the universe, nowhere in the universe would we have for even one second some program that might be used later in producing order in the universe. If such a program were to somehow permanently pop into existence (contrary to the limitations of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle), there is no reason to think that it would then somehow be applied generally as the universe's computer program. Since quantum fluctuations would be occurring all over the universe, any random process producing one computer program would also produce trillions of other computer programs. If those programs were then somehow used by the universe, what we would see is not the universe we see (one in which there are physical laws the same everywhere), but some totally different hodgepodge smorgasboard patchwork-quilt universe in which every little patch of space had its own laws of nature. Our universe is totally different, and scientists have done observations tending to confirm that laws of nature behave the same at opposite ends of the universe, indicating a great uniformity of law throughout the observable universe.

I may also note that there is absolutely no reason for thinking that a particular part of space would start to use a random program that happened to pop into existence due to a quantum fluctuation. Just because a computer program pops into existence doesn't mean that a nearby computer will start using that program as its operating system. Also, if we are to explain the order needed for life by postulating something like a computer program, we need not a random computer program created by quantum fluctuations, but a highly optimized, fine-tuned program (given the huge number of anthropic requirements for observers like us, discussed here).

But perhaps Lloyd is just speaking in metaphorical terms (despite making such statements in a scientific paper). Given his completely incorrect statement that “the ordinary laws of physics tell us nothing about why the universe is so complex,” perhaps Lloyd thinks that most of the universe's order is because of some lucky quantum density fluctuations in the early universe, and perhaps he is poetically or metaphorically referring to these as a computer program. In reality, only a small fraction of the universe's order (less than 10%) is due to such quantum density fluctuations, with most of it (much more than 50%) being due to the universe's seemingly optimized laws of nature and physical constants.

To his credit, Lloyd seems to have some general idea or suspicion that programming and computation play an important part in the universe. But he's taken this promising idea, and failed to create a workable thesis from it. The truth is that the universe's order is mainly caused by a series of highly favorable laws and fine-tuned physical constants that seem to have existed from the very beginning, a seemingly goal-oriented set of laws and constants that can only be described as programmatic and conceptual. Our universe seems to have been programmed for success from the very beginning, as I discuss here and here. We understand only a small part of this programming (that part which we call the known laws of nature), Far from being some simple thing that can be written on the back of a tee shirt, there is every reason to suspect that the programming that allows a life-containing universe to evolve from the super-dense state of the Big Bang is some programming vastly more complicated and proficient than any software man has ever created. We cannot plausibly explain that cosmic programming either through a theory of typing monkeys or through a theory of quantum fluctuations occurring after the origin of the universe.
 

If You Had Been Born in an Alternate Universe

We live in a universe consisting of galaxies which consist of stars which have planets revolving around them. But one can imagine totally different universes with completely different physical layouts. We can also imagine other universes with laws completely different from the laws of our universe. Let us imagine what it might be like if you had been born in such a universe, one very, very different from ours. 

 

A Simple Oceanic Universe

One interesting possibility is a universe that is one huge ocean. In this universe there are no stars or planets, and no empty space. This universe consists entirely of warm water, and objects and life floating around in the warm water. There might be absolutely no gravity in this universe.

If you had been born in such a universe, you would have no concepts such as the idea of a day or the idea of a year. You probably also would have no home. You would not need one, since you would have no need to protect yourself from bad weather. You would pretty much be like a fish floating around in the water, although you might have arms allowing you to grab things. You would have no idea at all of up or down, and no concept of the surface of the ocean or the bottom of the ocean. It would simply be that no matter how far you traveled in one direction, there would always still be more ocean for you to swim in. If the water in such a universe moved around slowly, you might grow up with your family of oceanic creatures. But if the water moved quickly, you might be separated from your parents very soon after birth, and forced to fend for yourself from a very early age.

Living in such a universe, it is rather doubtful that you would be part of any very complicated society. But if you were part of some society, and the society had villages or cities, such centers would probably be sphere-shaped rather than the almost flat cities we see on our planet.

Such a universe might be totally dark, requiring evolution to produce alternate senses such as sonar for the various species that evolved. Or perhaps such a universe might be dimly lit by phosphorescent plants and phosphorescent rocks.

An Oceanic Universe of Bubble Habitats

Now let us imagine an oceanic universe similar to the one just imagined, except for one big difference: rather than consisting only of living things and objects floating around in water, this universe would be only about 90% water, with one tenth of it being air. The air portions would consist of big bubbles of air existing within the ocean stretching endlessly onward in all directions. In such a case there might evolve creatures designed to live within such bubbles. Imagine yourself as one of those creatures.

You might live in a small ten-meter wide bubble, where there lived only you or your family. Or you might live in a much larger bubble, along with your family and many other families. Your entire city might be in a bubble.

Living in such a bubble, you might be able to jump or fly to any part of the bubble (assuming this universe had little or no gravity). To gather food, you would probably have to dive into the water that surrounded the bubble. Venturing out into the water that surrounded the bubble, you would have to be careful to remember how to get back to your bubble, or you might never see your family again.

This type of universe would be very different from anything in human experience, but humans might actually one day be able to experience such an environment. Space visionaries have imagined a space hotel with a zero gravity center consisting of a spherical pool with a big air bubble inside it. Space tourists would swim halfway through the sphere to get to the waterless center.

A Universe With Countless Inhabited Micro-Planets

In our universe planets (having diameters of thousands of kilometers) revolve around stars, and stars are separated by huge distances (trillions of kilometers). But it is easy to imagine a very different type of universe in which beings live on tiny little micro-planets, spheres that are only a few dozen meters or a few hundred meters or a few thousand meters in size. Such a universe might have millions of such micro-planets in every unit of space the size of our solar system.

Someone might argue that such a universe couldn't exist, because spheres of that size would not have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere. But that objection is not sound, for two reasons. First, we can imagine a universe in which the space between planets and stars is filled with air like the air on our planet. We can also imagine a universe with an entirely different gravitational constant, and in such a universe small spheres might generate enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, and prevent inhabitants from floating off into space. Such planets might get their heat either from regular sunlike stars, or from very small mini-stars, or perhaps just from the background temperature of space (which could be between 60 and 80 degrees in an alternate universe). 

 

A Strange Alternate Universe of Micro-Planets

Now imagine living in such an alternate universe. Your micro-planet might be only 50 meters in diameter. Living on it might be only your family and a few other families. Looking up at the sky, you would not see a vast expanse of empty blue. You would see many other micro-planets. You could probably also see many other people living on those micro-planets. But you might have no way of getting to any of those micro-planets, even though they were only a few hundred meters away. However, if the space between micro-planets was not a vacuum but was instead filled with air, you could probably travel to other micro-planets by using some kind of device resembling wings or a plane.

On the other hand, if the space between micro-planets was a vacuum, you might have no way of ever visiting any of the nearby micro-planets. You would see lots of other people in the sky, but would never be able to touch them. It would be most tragic if you fell in love with someone on a nearby micro-planet, because you would never be able to kiss that person or touch that person. But even if you could not visit anyone on a nearby micro-planet, you would probably have some way of communicating with them, possibly by flashing hand-signals, or using lights or fire as signals.

A Universe With Densely Packed Stars

In our universe stars are very far away, but it is easy to imagine a universe in which the distance between stars is a thousand times smaller. What would it be like living in such a universe?

For one thing, the night sky would be far more interesting, with starlight providing as much illumination as the sun. There would be no darkness at night, and the sky at night would look rather like a huge collection of jewels resting on a background of black velvet. If you lived in such a universe, alien visitations would probably be ridiculously common. You might hardly pay any attention when you read in your morning newspaper that another alien spaceship had arrived in orbit around your planet. Your planet would probably already be packed with visitors from other planets, and when you went to a bar it might well resemble the bar in the first Star Wars movie, with a huge variety of alien creatures.

A Universe With a Compact Spherical Geometry

In our universe, space is flat or almost flat. But another possible spatial geometry is for a universe to be spatially spherical. If you lived in a spatially spherical universe which was relatively compact, you might experience something incredibly strange as an astronaut. You might set off in a spaceship to explore the deepest reaches of space. After traveling for a long time, you might see ahead of you a planet that looked rather like your own planet. You would be very excited, and say to yourself: what a discovery – another planet like my own planet! As you approached nearer and nearer the planet, you would notice more and more resemblances between this planet and your own planet. Finally, as your ship drew closer, you would at last realize the truth: the planet ahead was actually your own planet, not some distant planet. Because of the spherical geometry of your universe, you would have traveled exactly to where you had started out from.

A Universe With Lots of Antimatter

In our universe there seems to be virtually no antimatter, but it is easy to imagine a universe in which there is a great deal of antimatter scattered around. When the tiniest bit of antimatter touches the tiniest bit of matter, both are converted to an enormous amount of energy.

Therefore, in an alternate universe containing lots of antimatter, you would not worry much about your career, your bank account, your love life, war, or the next election. What you would worry about above all is something in the sky blowing up and killing you. You would know that every year there would be a significant chance of an explosion in the sky that showered your planet with deadly radiation. So you would probably spend most of your life deep underground, waiting for the end of the radiation shower from the latest matter and antimatter explosion out in space.

A Universe With Very High Radioactivity

The previous hypothetical universes are very different from our own. But let us imagine a universe exactly like ours, with one difference: the strong nuclear force is significantly weaker, and the weak nuclear force is stronger. As a result, there is much more radioactivity. All this radioactivity causes everyone to be exposed to high radiation throughout their lives. As a result, almost everyone dies of cancer by the time they get to be sixteen.

If you lived in such a universe, you would probably not remember your mother and father, as they both would have died of cancer a few years after you were born. You probably would have been raised by one of your older brothers or sisters. In your society people would encourage marriage between people who just recently reached puberty. It would be the only way to keep your species alive, with almost everyone dying of cancer while they are still teenagers. 

 

You would probably only go to school for a few years, and start working at around age 8. If you announced to your boss as a 12-year old that you were pregnant, your boss (who would probably be only one or two years older than you) would congratulate you for following the norms of your society. But you would know that a few years after giving birth, you would also be dead of cancer, along with all of your friends. You, like all mothers on your planet, would weep about the fact that you would never be able to see your child grow up even halfway. Be thankful you do not live in such a universe.

Which Great Scientific Mysteries Are Likely to Be Solved in the Next 50 Years?

As discussed in this blog post, there are many great mysteries that baffle scientists and philosophers. But what are the chances that these mysteries will be solved in your lifetime? Let us look at particular mysteries, and estimate the chance that we will have a solution within the next fifty years.

The Mystery of the Big Bang

The main mystery involving the Big Bang is what caused it. We are extremely unlikely to ever resolve this mystery in the next fifty years. When we look to the edges of the universe, billions of light-years away, we are looking back in time. But no matter how powerful our telescopes might be, we can never look back to the first 380,000 years of the universe's history. In the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter was so densely packed that photons of light could not travel for more than the shortest length before colliding into a proton or electron. This basically means that light from the earliest stage of the universe is effectively blocked, and we are forbidden from looking back to the first 380,000 years of the universe's history.

We can study the cosmic background radiation, dating from this time about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We have already launched two satellites to do this, the most recent being the Planck satellite. But the observations made by that satellite have offered no new breakthroughs. The chance that we will find the answer to the cause of the Big Bang by studying the cosmic background radiation further is almost negligible.

I estimate that there is less than 1 chance in 100 that scientists will solve this mystery in the next 50 years. Super-fast computers will be of no help in solving this mystery. 

 

The Mystery of Dark Energy

Dark energy is the mysterious energy that is believed to make up about 68% of the universe's mass-energy. Scientists have no clear idea of what it is, although they have a vague suspicion that it may have to do with virtual particles created in the vacuum of space.

The hugely expensive Large Hadron Collider has not got us any closer to unraveling the mystery of dark energy. Next year the LHC will begin new activity that will greatly increase the energy of its collisions. It is still very unlikely that this will produce anything helping to solve the mystery of dark energy.

As discussed here, there are plans for a 60-mile long successor to the Large Hadron Collider, one that will be completed in 2035. There is not much reason to be hopeful that this will solve the mystery of dark energy, although it may shed some light on it.

Super-fast computers will be of little help in solving this mystery. I estimate that there is less than 1 chance in 10 that scientists will solve the dark energy mystery in the next 50 years.

The Mystery of Dark Matter

Dark matter is believed to be a mysterious type of matter that makes up more of the universe than ordinary matter. The problem with dark matter is that it cannot be directly observed through ordinary methods. So it is very unlikely that we will understand it very well any time in the next few decades. About the most we can hope for are some type of observations that clearly nail down the fact that it really exists.

I estimate that there is less than 1 chance in 3 that scientists will solve the dark matter mystery in the next 50 years, in the sense of getting a clear idea of what type of particles it is made of. 

 

The Origin of Life

Very little progress has been made in discovering exactly how life originated on Earth billions of years ago. There was a ray of hope when Stanley Miller did his famous experiments back in the 1950's, but since then progress has been very slow.

The prospect of vast strides in supercomputers offers some hope that some progress may be made in helping to solve this mystery. Conceivably vastly improved supercomputers might do some kind of simulation involving billions or trillions of chemical combinations, a simulation that might throw new light on the mystery of the origin of life and the origin of the genetic code. We can also imagine that there might be robotized chemistry laboratories that might help to resolve the issue.

I can optimistically estimate that there might be as much as 1 chance in 3 that this mystery will be solved in the next fifty years.

The Mystery of Existence

The mystery of existence is the age-old mystery of why there exists something rather than nothing. It is a perplexing problem, because nothing seems more natural and plausible than simplicity, and the simplest possible state of existence is complete nonexistence – no God, no matter, no energy, no universe, just absolutely nothing, forever and ever. So why didn't such a perfectly simple state of existence (complete eternal nonexistence) occur?

I see no real chance that any new scientific observations can solve this problem, and it isn't likely that supercomputers will help us solve it. There is some chance that we might be able to resolve this mystery by increasing our intelligence, and increasing our ability for philosophical reasoning. We might then be able to understand some reason for existence that we failed to grasp before.

But that would require a major increase in human intelligence, which is probably a long way off (the assurances of singularity enthusiasts notwithstanding). I therefore estimate that there is less than 1 chance in 10 that we will resolve the mystery of existence in the next fifty years.

The Mystery of Whether We Are Alone in the Universe

There are two ways in which this mystery might be resolved: negatively or positively. We would resolve this mystery negatively if we were to somehow prove that we are alone in the universe. We would resolve this mystery positively if we somehow found out that we are not alone in the universe.

There is zero chance that we will resolve this mystery negatively in the next fifty years, and zero chance that we ever resolve this mystery negatively. This is because the universe is too big. Our galaxy has billions of stars, and there are billions of galaxies. Even if we somehow create spaceships capable of traveling instantaneously (something most unlikely), it would still take millions of years to survey all the planets in our galaxy, determining that none had intelligent life. By the time such a job were finished, we still could not say we are alone in the galaxy, because during those millions of years intelligent life could have still have evolved on planets when we were not checking them. And that's just the difficulty of determining that we are alone in the galaxy – the job of determining we are alone in the universe would be billions of times more difficult.

When it comes to the possibility of resolving this mystery positively (determining that we are not alone in the universe), we have an entirely different situation. We have a decent chance of doing that in the next fifty years. All we would need to do would be to pick up a radio transmission from another civilization.

This is one area where advances in supercomputers might help. Such advances may allow us to scan millions of frequencies for radio signals more efficiently.

I therefore optimistically estimate that there is about 1 chance in 2 that we will resolve the mystery of whether we are alone in the universe in the next fifty years.

The Mystery of Cosmic Fine-Tuning

The mystery of cosmic fine-tuning is the mystery of why the universe seems to be so exquisitely calibrated to allow the existence of intelligent creatures such as us. Anyone doubting that there seems to be such fine-tuning should read this post and this post.

It is most unlikely that we will discover any final answer to this mystery in the next fifty years, as unlikely as you becoming a lottery millionaire. Despite the misguided enthusiasm of multiverse enthusiasts (who imagine a huge collection of universes, each with different characteristics), there is basically zero prospect of ever being able to confirm such an idea – unless you wish to imagine some machine for transporting a man or a robot into different universes, an idea even more implausible than a machine for sending a man back in time.

The Mystery of Consciousness

The mystery of consciousness is the mystery of how consciousness arises from matter, something that seems to be entirely different from consciousness. Philosophers have long pondered this question. We currently have no understanding of how this occurs. There are various exotic theories, such as Roger Penrose's theory involving quantum effects in microtubules.

Some think that solving the mystery of consciousness is just a matter of increasing the resolution of brain scanners. Some optimists think that if we can only scan neurons with ever more detail, and understand more precisely the exact chemistry and physics of brain actions, we will one day understand the mystery of how the brain produces consciousness. Others think that no matter how much progress we make in understanding the brain, we will never be able to understand exactly how consciousness is produced by it. They point out that we can never imagine seeing some high-magnification photograph from an electron microscope or a diagram of a chemical reaction or a printout of brain electricity, and then really understanding how consciousness could arise from that.

Because such reasoning seems powerful, I estimate that there is no more than 1 chance in 5 that we will solve the mystery of consciousness in the next fifty years.

Conclusion

Most of the great mysteries of nature are not things we should expect to see solved in our lifetimes. Get used to living in a mysterious universe, for it is most unlikely that more than one or two of the deepest mysteries will be cleared up in your lifetime. There will be fantastic advances in computing power and robotics in your lifetime, but that will do us very little good in solving most of the great mysteries that face us.

As far as how we can best spend our money to help solve age-old mysteries, the technology with the best chance of producing results is probably not hugely expensive particle colliders costing many billions, but instead relatively inexpensive radio telescopes that can be constructed with only millions of dollars. Besides offering the hope of solving the age-old mystery of whether we are alone in the universe, such devices might allow us to receive radio signals from beings vastly older than us. Conceivably they might give us the answer to cosmic mysteries that might take us many thousands of years to solve on our own.

The Universe's Batting Average

People love simple numbers that serve as a measure of someone's level of success. When you are a high school student and you start worrying about getting into college, the first thing you find out is that colleges are primarily interested in two numbers: your SAT score and your GPA number. In the world of baseball, the all-important numbers are batting average (an indication of hitting skill) and ERA (an indication of pitching skill).

But is there any way to “scale up” this concept of “one number as a measure of success” concept? Can we compute a single number that we might call America's batting average? Or can we compute a single number that we might call Earth's batting average? I have no ideas on how someone might compute either of these. But I do have some ideas on how we might compute the universe's batting average.

My general strategy for computing the universe's batting average is as follows:

1. We identify some highly desirable physical occurrence, outcome, or characteristic, with great significance to life in the universe.
   
2. We calculate in what percentage of the cases that highly desirable occurrence or outcome happens.
   
3. We scale that percentage to get a statistic similar to the batting average (a number such as .500).
   

Let's look at three different ways in which we can apply this strategy.

Relevant Fraction #1: The Percentage of Galaxies That are Spiral Galaxies or Irregular Galaxies

Galaxies are collections of millions or billions of stars. There are three main types of galaxies: spiral galaxies, irregular galaxies, and elliptical galaxies.

Types of galaxies (Credit: NASA)

Elliptical galaxies can be considered rather inferior for two reasons. For one thing, most elliptical galaxies have relatively little free-floating gas and dust, and are apparently not forming new stars. This means that the very old stars that make up elliptical galaxies may not have enough of the heavy elements needed for life. It is believed that the amount of heavy elements in a galaxy is proportional to how many generations of stars there have been in that galaxy.

Also, from a purely esthetic standpoint, elliptical galaxies are lacking. Elliptical galaxies are just boring blobs that aren't nearly as beautiful as spiral galaxies.

Irregular galaxies and spiral galaxies do have lots of dust and gas, and do form new stars. So from the standpoint of life, we can regard both spiral galaxies and irregular galaxies as being more of a “sign of success” than elliptical galaxies.

The internet has differing estimates of the percentage of galaxies that are elliptical, spiral, or irregular. I will take this NASA web page as authoritative, and it says, “Like more than two thirds of the known galaxies, the Milky Way has a spiral shape.” Other sources say that 70% of the galaxies near our galaxy are spiral galaxies. We can therefore estimate that the total percentage of galaxies that are spiral or irregular (not elliptical) is about 70%. This gives us our first batting average for the universe.

Cosmic Batting Average Number 1: .700

This percentage is actually one of the most important success indicators of the universe. There are quite a few reasons why slightly different cosmic parameters (or slightly different laws of nature) would have resulted in either zero galaxies in the universe or a very low fraction of life-favorable galaxies.

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Relevant Fraction #2: The Percentage of Stars That Have Planets

Another important fraction-type indicator of the degree of success of a universe is the percentage of stars that have planets. Of course, it wouldn't do any good to have a beautiful spiral galaxy if there weren't any planets revolving around the stars in that galaxy (or at least the only good of such a galaxy would be the esthetic good its beauty would provide to observers in other galaxies).

Before it developed problems with its gyroscopes, the Kepler Space Telescope did years of observations that allow us to estimate the percentage of stars having planets. There is also a technique called microlensing that astronomers have used to detect planets revolving around other stars. One recent scientific paper by a large team of scientists stated: "We conclude that stars are orbited by planets as a rule, rather than the exception." Based on that study we can estimate that at least 60% of stars have planets, which gives us the following batting average:

Cosmic Batting Average Number 2: .600

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Relevant Fraction #3: The Percentage of Natural Elements That are Non-Radioactive

Another very important fraction-type quality indicator of the universe is the percentage of elements that are non-radioactive. If a large majority of the elements were to be radioactive, it would be incredibly difficult to have much of a life living in our universe. You might live for a short time, but all that radioactivity would quickly give you cancer, so you wouldn't live for long.

Since you know that most people older than ten do not have cancer, you can guess what the answer is here. The percentage of naturally occurring radioactive elements is only about 20%. There are some 98 naturally occurring elements (or 92, according to other estimates). Some 80 of these elements are not radioactive. (In any case in which an element has a stable isotope and a rare but radioactive isotope -- for example, carbon—I am counting that as a non-radioactive element.)

Since there are about 98 naturally occurring elements, and about 80 naturally occurring non-radioactive elements, the percentage of non-radioactive elements is roughly 80%. This gives us our final batting average:

Cosmic Batting Average Number 3: .800

I may note that we should not at all take for granted that we live in a universe with relatively little radioactivity. You could modify the universe's fundamental constants just a little, and we would not be so lucky. A decrease of only about 20% in the strong nuclear force would cause almost all elements to be radioactive. If that were the case, you would probably not reach the age of 20 without dying of cancer.

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Conclusion

If we add up these three numbers and divide by three, we get an average number of .700. So that is our final estimated batting average of the universe: .700.  As batting averages go, that is very good (much better than Ty Cobb's lifetime average). 

There are two other important fractions that would be nice to learn to make a more definitive calculation of the universe's batting average. The first fraction is the approximate percentage of Earth-sized planets (in the habitable zone of a star) where life appears. The second fraction is the approximate percentage of life-bearing planets on which intelligence evolves. Both of these fractions have a great importance when considering the overall “degree of success” that the universe has. Unfortunately, we currently do not know what either of these fractions are. They could have any value between .000000001 and .999.

We might one day have a basis for estimating these fractions, particularly if we ever achieve radio contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. But for now the value of these fractions is completely unknown. So it will be a good long time before we can make a more definitive calculation of the batting average of the universe. All that can be said for now is that the preliminary indications are that the universe's batting average is very high.