We see the universe through our eyes.
That viewpoint, when trying to find your place in it is inherently biased.
It used to be a fact that the Earth was the center of the solar system.
Again, based on our biased viewpoint.
Douglas Adams famously imagined a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, “This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
Life of all sorts has evolved to fit its given environment. From the insect eating, sonar ’seeing’ bats to the symbiotic tubeworms living on the sea floor in water reaching over 600 degrees, every creatures sees its world perfectly suited to its own needs. So well, that one would think it designed.
Again, this is an issue I had with the time travel article in Discover magazine. People who state the staggering odds of the universe randomly turning out to “fit us perfectly” should always get a huge red flag. We would probably have evolved to “perfectly fit” into any universe we happened to find ourselves. Let’s say that things were different and we lived on a different planet, say venus, that has tempuratures topping 800F and we breathed CO2 and ate Sulfuric Acid and Chlorine. We would be going around publishing papers about how the universe was made specifically for us and how lucky we were to not have evolved on Earth, because, as anyone can see, Earth is inhospitable and unable to support any life, seeing as it exceedingly too far from the sun and outside of any “Goldilocks Zone”. People say that Venus can’t support life. They can’t possibly imagine people trying to live in a high pressure furnace. True, we would not last a moment on Venus. That’s because we did not evolve to be suited to that environment. There is plenty of places here on Earth I could not survive in, that doesn’t mean those areas don’t support life and that the life found therein is not content in its perfectly suited environment.
Different does not mean wrong.
