Right from the beginning a 'feel good' factor existed through the article, when the author took us on a journey from fundamental laws to life. I read it like a beautiful story. But no where did the author allow us to go beyond the story line to actual connection of the causes to processes described. More or less, each step felt like a reasonable connection, without being able to see actually how. For instance, "Higher organisms such as ourselves have developed positive and negative emotions as one way of aiding survival but these also result in us setting ourselves goals that give us pleasure without affecting survival." From our privileged cognitive capacity to understanding emotion, and pleasure, we know what he is referring to, but we develop no idea of what is emotion, or pleasure, in the physical realm, and how do they emerge? Most importantly, what kind of language of expression nature must have to express such abstract notions?
Again it felt so nice from anthropic principles to learn how lucky we are at each stage of our development, or of our abilities. But could it be possible that we simply have no imagination of what other forms of systematic information processors may be naturally lurking around? I deliberately did not use the term 'intelligent life forms', high level information processing systems seem as good. Or, if nature needed to create a clever organism only far fewer times, the interventions by such organisms would then bring about far greater and sophisticated forms of living things, and I do not mean only robotic instances. I often feel it is the limitation of our imagination that has reflected itself as anthropic thinking.
The vastness of known universe may have such exciting possibilities that the wildest of thinkers, novelist, science fiction film makers may not ever be able to capture that.
There is one point about the essay that goes without saying, it brings out in no uncertain terms, the extreme preciousness of life forms on earth, in particular of higher intelligent being. It should be taught in every forms of education, in every class rooms, to every human being who does not care for the limit of resources (dear Americans), and to every politician on the planet.
Rajiv