We owe our very lives to the element carbon, which was first manufactured in stars before the Earth formed. The challenge in creating carbon is getting two helium niclei in stars to stick together until they are struck by a third. It turns out that this is accomplished only because of internal resonances, or energy levels, of carbon and oxygen nuclei. If the carbon resonance level were only 4 percent lower, carbon atoms wouldnt form. Were the oxygen resonance level only half a percent higher, almost all the carbon would issappear as it combined with helium to form oxygen. This means that human existence depends on the fine tuning of these two nuclear resonances.
"If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly rqual quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are just the two levels you have to fix. Your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are cutally found to be... A common sense interpretation of the facts suggest that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers once calculates from the facts seems to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question... Rather than accept that fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose the the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act."
Stephen Hawking has stimated that if the rate of the universe's expansion once second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million the universe would have recollapsed. The universe must live for billions of years to permit time for intelligent life to evolve. On the other hand. the universe might have expanded so rapidly that protons and electrons never united to make hydrogen atoms.
