We share 99.8% of our chromosomes with apes. What we're made up of makes up something like 0.001% of all the energy in the universe. To say that we're insignificant because we aren't as big as a gas giant planet, we share the same number of chromosomes as a fruit fly, those are empty soulless arguments.

I'm Peter Robinson. A senior lecturer at Western Sydney University in Australia, the astrophysicist Luke Barnes received his doctorate from Cambridge. Doctor Barnes is co author of A Fortunate Universe, Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. The cosmologist Brian Keating completed his doctoral work at Brown. He now serves as professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego and is director of the Simons Observatory in Chile.

Simons Observatory?

Simons Observatory. Did I mispronounce both? It's the Simons Observatory in Chile.

From the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory in Chile.

I will never forget, and no one will anybody else. Doctor Keating is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor. Jay Richards holds a doctorate from the Princeton Theological Seminary. He serves as senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and as a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Doctor Richards is the co author of The Privileged Planet, How Our Place in the Cosmos is designed for Discovery, a book that will celebrate its 20th anniversary in,

August of 2024.

August of 2024. Excellent. Alright. Cosmic Fine Tuning, Luke Barnes in A Fortunate Universe. The fundamental particles from which everything is constructed and the fundamental forces that dictate interactions appear to be fine tuned for life. You have before you a total layman. What do you mean?

Well, the first thing to realize is that you're made out of fundamental things, physical things. And one of the things we'd like to know as a general, you know, curiosity about the universe is why are they this way? Why aren't they some other way? And a and a way that we could start to get a handle on that question is, well, let's take our best physics and let's see what would have happened. Let's, in theory, just change some of the fundamental numbers. Yeah. Let's let's turn some of these dials according to our best theories that, you know, these dials can be changed as far as we know. Everything's still mathematically fine. And what we find is that it's okay. Some of the dials, not much of a change, but there's a couple of very important ones that involve the the the particles, the forces, and and the universe as a whole, where seemingly rather small changes would make a dramatic effect to the way our universe would have played out.

So, for example, you're made out of a variety of very interesting chemical experiment, but change those numbers and suddenly particles don't stick to each other. You can't make complexity anymore. These are the sorts of things that happened. So suddenly you change this dial and and some particles that were would have held together, that do held together in all of us suddenly don't don't do that anymore. Things decay, things fall apart. So our universe, the ability of us here to do this, the ability of stars, planets, galaxies to form, it's a rare talent. It's not one that every universe that we can calculate, that we can imagine has.

Okay. So am I allowed to leap ahead to the idea that it is all as if it were designed for us, or is that a very is that is that theorists that's an unscientific proposition I suppose. But, so what do you wanna say? You wanna say, we should not just take it all for granted it could have been wildly different if even a few of how many variables by the way? Give me some idea.

Within the standard models, there are 31 numbers you need to to describe the way matter works and the way the universe as a whole works. Within those 31, a lot of them are just sort of weird properties of neutrinos, particles you've never heard of and not made out of, so who cares? With there's a core of, I would say, maybe 10, where interesting, dramatic, and often catastrophic stuff starts to happen if you if you mess with those dials.

Alright. From the fortunate universe again, we go from the universe to this planet, or the difference between this planet and the universe. We usually take air for granted, but the density of the air you are breathing is 10 to the 27th times the average density of material in the universe.

Yeah.

So we just got theory, very lucky.

Well, did we? There's one point of Keating, are we in a lucky place in the universe? And and I don't think there's a reason to treat the surface of the Earth as a random spot. Of course, we're where the matter is, where we are, you know, we're made out of it.

Right. Of