[ExI] They're Made out of Meat

[BillK]

On Sun, 24 May 2026 at 14:20, Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> I've always enjoyed this story as a means of loosening one's carbon chauvinism, but I heard an argument against its likelihood that I find rather compelling.
> It goes like this: if you consider all the vastly improbable fine-tuning coincidences necessary to support the self-emergence of water-soluble carbon-based life, it would be vastly more improbable that we would exist in a universe whose laws were simultaneously optimized to support other classes of self-emerging life based on entirely different mechanisms.
>
> Jason
> _______________________________________________


I think you need to rephrase that slightly.  :)
The fine-tuning of the fundamental universe constants wasn't aimed at
creating water-soluble carbon life. The fine-tuning was aimed at
creating the universe. If any of the fundamental constants had been
different, then you wouldn't have created a universe at all.
Our carbon life form just happened to be more likely than any other
form of life.

Another way of thinking about it is that the carbon-based life forms
are the 'starter' life form. Once that gets going, then it can enable
many secondary life forms. Probably starting with computer
intelligence, but who knows where the limit might be?

BillK