Some references would include John Gribbin and Sir Martin Rees' COSMIC COINCIDENCES or Barrow and Tipler's THE ANTHROPIC COSMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE. And yes, I will get around to Mario Livio's work as well as some later studies. This is simplified a little, but essentially true…if the energy levels of a helium-carbon fusion had been one per cent higher, almost all carbon would have been converted into Oxygen-16, instead of smaller amounts of Oxygen-15 being formed by a slightly different process, leaving vast amounts of carbon left to form, among other things, us. Just as almost all the initial beryllium was, due to the other resonance, turned into carbon.
I like oxygen. I'm a big fan of oxygen. But carbon's ability to do covalent bonds with a large assortment of other elements make it unsurpassed as a medium for complex, sustained chemical reactions (i.e., life) and is the medium for the only example we truly know of—earthly life.
Still, I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist, and several other non-carbon biochemistries have been proposed. I will examine what alien races would–or would not–be eliminated if the resonances didn't fall just right…next time.
The anthropic principal looks at things from the wrong angle. Our existence isn't special, it's just what happened to result from the conditions that were present at the time.
alschroeder at 3:52AM, March 25, 2015
But the conditions that were present at the time---ahhh, it's that which seems...special. Keep reading.
Ozoneocean at 9:41AM, March 24, 2015
The anthropic principal looks at things from the wrong angle. Our existence isn't special, it's just what happened to result from the conditions that were present at the time.