Is a human being the more difficult creation, or the universe?

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Cool question. It seems fairly obvious from the structure of the universe that it aims to produce us. Could be the Anthropic principle at it again, or someone out there making universes could have realized that the complex bundle of constants that make up our quantum physics was necessary to produce sentient life.

To be sure, you can’t rule out the Anthropic principle. For the layman, the Anthropic principle tries to rule out “woo-woo” hypotheses about how the universe was created by using a more elaborate form of the survivor bias. We wouldn’t be around to contemplate how the cosmological constants of the world came about if they didn’t support life. Pair that with Occam’s Razor and you have a neat materialist understanding of the universe.

Well except for the part where it has no idea how it actually came about.

The universe is truly and unbelievably massive. So massive you need to spend quite a bit of time to understand just how. Take the number of stars in the galaxy. There are more galaxies in the observable universe than there are stars in this one. And the observable universe is just a tiny fraction of the actual universe.

What we don’t understand yet is, well, everything about evolution. Is DNA the only game in town? If we go out and look at a dozen different life-bearing worlds, are they all going to have DNA-based life? We don’t really know?

What about the conditions for primate evolution? If we find the sentient life on said life-bearing worlds, are they going to look like primates? But wait just a minute there! Are the mammals going to dominate the upper levels of the food chains of land-based eukaryote life like they did here?

Essentially, the entire history of evolution, we have studied why things turned out the way they did. Even if we found only one other life-bearing planet, we would have enough grist for the scientific mill to last centuries.

If things don’t turn out the same way they did here, we still will have a lot to study. Why? Why didn’t eukaryotes evolve on a particular world? Why did reptiles dominate as opposed to mammals?

Other things are important too. Sexual dimorphism seems to be necessary, on this world at least, for complex mammals.

At this point, it seems unlikely to say that humans are the pinnacle of evolution everywhere in this universe. But what if we were? What if you go look at all the other life-bearing worlds, and you can easily see they either just didn’t make it far enough to evolve humans, or you see fucking humans everywhere? How amazing would that be? Literally everything about this universe is tuned precisely to evolve humans?

It’s not that far-fetched. There are a lot of seeming accidents in evolution. How important is accidentals in evolution? Would we just see bipedal primates with slightly different mitochondria? Or would their cell structures differ even greatly? So much that it would be hard to call them cells at all?