Author notes

COINCIDENCE ONE, Page 5 (Goldilocks and the Just-Right Resonances)

alschroeder

on Dec. 1, 2013

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.