Let’s face it. If some deity designed the universe expressly for the purpose of humans, one would think that we could inhabit a little more of it than this minuscule little rock we live on. Too, the universe is out to get us. Not in just a few ways either. These big fat blobs of meat and water that we call us are pathetically easy to destroy… although, that may be the deity’s plan. I mean, how many times have various deities destroyed the planet or plan to destroy the planet. The Christian god has already done it once and plans to do it again (according to their particular myths).
We live on the planet Earth. And compared to humans, it’s pretty darned big. But even then, we can survive (without technology) on less than 25% of the surface of the planet. Arguably less than that if you count really tall mountains, islands with no water supply, and other strange and inhospitable places. But we have the technology and can survive and thrive anywhere (except for flood zones, within 50 miles of a volcano, places where we can’t grow food, etc).
Of course, almost every organism on this planet is trying to eat us, parasitize us (or the organisms we eat), or use us as incubators for the next generation. Those that aren’t trying to do that to us, we’re doing that to them.
Then there’s the pesky ways the universe is going to destroy all life on this planet. We don’t need a deity to do it. The universe is perfectly capable of doing it on its own. Asteroids, nearby supernova (like with a couple of light years), massive solar flares. Heck, even our sun (at the end of its life) will swell into a red giant that’s larger than the orbit of the Earth. Yep, what’s left of our planet will be orbiting (for a few weeks) on the inside of the Sun. Of course, we (or whatever ancestors we may or may not have) will have been cooked long before that happens.
And what about extinctions. Well over 99% of all live forms that have ever lived on this planet are extinct. It’s not really good odds. Modern humans have been around for barely a quarter million years (depending on how you define ‘modern’ and ‘human’). Some species have been around way longer than that. Crocodiles, as a group, have lasted longer than almost everything except sharks. We’re talking hundreds of millions of years.
If humans survive that long, then we can start talking about how well things are designed for us.
But let’s look at this minuscule dirt ball as compared to the rest of the universe.
By my calculations (and I’m making this up because the numbers are just too mind boggling), within out solar system. Humans can survive on less than 0.00000000001% of the available surface area (depending on how you define the surface area of the gas giants). If we’re talking volume… well, it’s a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. Effectively non-existent.
The observable universe is 93 billion light years in diameter, with the actual universe being larger still. What percentage, do you think, of the volume of the universe is habitable for humans? I’d be willing to guess we’d need scientific notation to get that small and it still be more zeros than I’d care to think about.
We can’t survive in the vacuum of space (please don’t comment with references to Spaceballs). Our bodies are pressure. When thing under pressure are put into a vacuum, they tend to… well… pop. Humans aren’t meant to… pop. At the average ambient temperature of space, our blood will boil in the low pressure. Oh, we could survive for a minute or two, but you aren’t going to be deactivating a homicidal computer after spending 2-3 minutes in deep space.
Then there’s these gas giants, which are perfectly good planets. Some are so big, they might as well be stars… well D-list stars maybe. Humans like a little pressure, but not too much. Even the pressure at the bottom of a fairly shallow ocean can kill an unprotected human. The pressure on the surface of a gas giant is high enough to turn hydrogen into a metal. Yeah, metallic hydrogen. Think “thin red smear” when you think about putting a human in that kind of environment.
Then there’s the radiation. The universe is bathed in deadly radiation. Our planet protects us (hah!) with magnetic force fields kilometers thick. If it wasn’t for those, then just going outside would be nearly suicide.
So far, in this nearly unimaginably vast universe, there is only one place we can survive. And that place is constantly in danger from relativistic missiles in the form of asteroids, radiation, super-volcanoes, our own short-sighted behaviors. Nearly everything else in that one tiny place is trying to kill us, or eat us, or lay its eggs in us. We are pathetically weak, no claws, slow, unarmored, and can survive only in nearly ideal conditions without the one tool that we have (and millions of people utterly fail to use).
So, taking all this into account, please explain again how the universe was designed “for us”.
