Letters to the Editor
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Rare Earth
There really ought to be a way to search a thread, if only to avoid duplicating reading recommendations.
Just a suggestion that folks might enjoy considering the arguments put forward in the book, "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe" by Ward and Brownlee. These arguments don't tend to devolve to dancing on the head of a pin arguments about the anthropic principle, but make a lot of sense. Folks that just want to marvel at the cosmic oooh, ahhh factor might google Olber's Paradox or the "collapse of the wave function".
One might also want to consider synthesizing Davies' not too outrageous extension of the standard model of QM with Dawkin's notion of the extended phenotype. If current day peeping Toms are responsible for collapsing the grandpappy of all wave functions during the Big Bang, that certainly is one heck of an extended phenotype...