Quote from jem:
...that leaves you with two choices at the moment.
One universe which looks spectacularly designed...
or, infinite unprovable unverifiable, unseen, untested universes, megaversses or landscapes.
The above conclusion is yours, and not that of Susskind.
Susskind's conclusion is: "somewhere in the megaverse the constant equals this number: somewhere else it is that number. We live in one tiny pocket where the value of the constant is consistent with our kind of life. Thatâs it! Thatâs all. There is no other answer to the question."
And, indeed that "is" it. In Susskind's audio interview, he restates this same conclusion by confirming that it may be that the constant as currently measured, may only be local to where humans inhabit space within this universe. So, even without string theory, this cosmological constant may be variable in our existing universe.
Now, let me take this one step farther, because I really dislike the idea of trying to argue from some editor's opinion of a genius' work. It's like listening to three 15-second excerpts from Stravinsky's "The Right of Spring." You may think you've heard the music, but you ain't heard nothin' yet.
In Susskind's paper, "Disturbing implications of a Cosmological Constant" (
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0208/0208013.pdf), the author discusses what he describes as the very small probability of conditions arising to produce the local cosmic environment hospitable to human life (anthropic). He states that out of the total e10^120 possible microstates of the universe, only e10^10 are likely states where anthropic conditions would prevail -- and then he says that such conditions are "extraordinary unlikely."
Sounds promising for the intelligent design advocate, huh? Except for one not so little tiny detail:
e10^10 possibilities is a number that is SO FRIGGIN' BIG that my Excel spreadsheet generates an error when it attempts to express it. That is, the number of possible states under which anthropic conditions might theoretically arise, even though it is an infinitessimally small part of the total possible unverse, is nevertheless extraordinarily large by any reasonable measure.
To get a sense of just how many possibilities remain, it is the equivalent of buying every one of the 129,000,000 possible Powerball(r) Lotto tickets multiplied by 535,465,974: 69 billion possibilities.
Oh, and I almost forgot -- in order to get that calculation without breaking Excel, I had to take the natural log of the numbers and then multiply them. So, you need to use that 69 billion as a POWER of e (approx. 2.71) in order to get the real number of possibilities.
So, the real number of possibilities for anthropic space in our universe is:
92,537,817,255,877,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That's a lot of places for carbon- based life to develop in. And this doesn't discount the very real possibility that life can be other than carbon based.
Which is one of the reasons why Susskind and other physicists conclude that the anthropic principle is really an illusion.
There is an enormous amount of possible opportunities in our universe for anthropic conditions to arise, without the introduction of any "extrinsic" designer.