Only if you are stupendously lazy*. Gravity waves, like all light waves, pass through each other without interacting. Life actually requires a number of far more specific characteristics to work :
a. It requires something able to catalyze something else into a piece of the same something. Gravity waves are right out because of the lack of interaction.
b. Complex life requires a pool of these self-catalyzing devices to be present in the same place and time such that they can compete with one another. A cloud of gas or small specs of nanometer scale dust expanding forever into the void cannot become complex life.
c. Complex life requires the environment to be stable enough that the information - the catalyzing “something” - is not destroyed faster than it can be created. This also means there must be an energy gradient to create information. Thus, a ball of matter at a smidgen over zero kelvin can’t create life, no energy gradient. The hot gas cloud of our sun doesn’t support life starting there, too much disruption for it to ever evolve.
And like 10 others, point is, gravity waves fail the first test and many other tests will fail out a great many other possibilities.
*Ok, I apologize for being harsh, but I don’t see how you could have “envisioned” this working. You would have needed to think of a way for a gravity wave - which requires mass to be created - to catalyze the creation of an identical gravity wave to itself, or a sub-component of itself that can be assembled into itself. That’s the first step towards life. The very first one.
I have to admit it would be difficult to imagine how gravitational waves could form the necessary structures that we might recognize as being something akin to light, but they are non-linear (i.e. gravitational waves interact with gravitational waves unlike em waves)
Ok, I stand corrected on that point. You then do have to posit how they can catalyze creation of similar waves, and how the system deals with perpetual energy loss. If waves are ever expanding and ever growing weaker, you cannot have “something” creating itself - the fundamental definition of what life is.
Is there any conceivable way that a self-aware being could arise in any universe except through natural selection?
Thus, to restate SamuelA’s requirements slightly differently: in addition to suffiient basic stability, we need a mechanism for reproduction and heredity (variation is also required, but that’s almost inevitable).
The actual mechanisms for reproduction and heredity could be beyond our wildest imagination, but I think they must exist in some form. What alternative is there?
Life as we know it is based on atoms. Is there any way for an atom to catalyze the creation of an identical atom? It’s not the gravitational waves themselves which need to be reproduced; it’s the patterns in them.
The hard SF novel “Dragon’s Egg” by Robert L Forward describes the evolution of life (in our universe) in a strong-force environment on the surface of a neutron star.
It’s amazing that we exist in a universe that is able for us to exist and not in a universe that we can’t exist in.
So there are a bajillion universes where any kind of life like us could exist. Well, we don’t exist there, so speculating why we exist where we exist is like speculating why fish swim in water rather than fly through the air. (Except for flying fish - shush, don’t bring up silly exceptions.)
The fine-tuning “problem” is that we developed in a universe in which we could develop. That seems hardly something that needs explaining. Without knowing what other possibilities there are, it’s meaningless to try to evaluate the likelihood that we have arisen at all. The likelihood is now 1 - we’re here.
Asking why the universe exists at all is one thing. Asking why our universe is the way it is requires mostly speculation and very little actual science. It’s a guessing game with no answer book to check and see who is right.
Maybe it’s a why question instead of a how question because we don’t yet have enough foundational information to make it a how question. Suppose there are some constraints that we haven’t yet identified. Those would be like the chemistry rules that make water a dissolver.
Well, proponents of the fine-tuning argument say “God”, not that I think that’s a scientific explanation.
That is not the fine-tuning problem. See e.g. the account from Andre Linde that I linked at post#36, or read the rest of this thread. The fine-tuning problem arises from the fact that the only viable models that we have for the universe do not constrain parameter values (and we can’t find one that does, despite decades of trying); all parameter values seem to be possible, and the vast majority are not consistent with life.
The fine-tuning argument for God is little more than “we don’t understand X, therefore Jeebus”.
But don’t confuse this with the real fine-tuning problem in physics. When physicists call this a “problem” it does not imply that it’s paradoxical or insoluble of that we must turn to God. It’s just a problem in the sense that we don’t know which of several possible naturalistic explanations is the correct resolution. One of the possible resolutions is the multiverse and the anthropic principle.
Scientific American had an article pointing out that the fine-tuning argument overlooks that there might be combinations of alternate constants that could allow for life to exist.
For the purposes of chemical reactions, different atoms of the same element are indistinguishable, and this is nearly always true even in the case of differing isotopes.
Only the outer electron shell matters in most cases.
I guess when I said “identical” I meant “Functionally indistinguishable”. So by what mechanism can gravity ways accomplish, this even in theory? Give the simplest case you can think of.
All gravitons are also indistinguishable. What you would have would be a Universe entirely filled with gravitational waves. Each wave would pass through any given region at c, and quickly leave for parts unknown. But new gravitational waves would also be entering the region at the same rate, so there would still always be gravitational waves present. Meanwhile, the waves would be interacting with each other, and patterns would emerge within the waves. These patterns would also be moving, but not necessarily at c: It’s possible, for instance, to have sound waves propagating through a gas of massless photons, and those sound waves travel at 1/3 c.
Now, I realize that there’s a heck of a big step from “self-interacting patterns which propagate at less than c” to “life”. But then, there’s a heck of a big step to our kind of life, too. And once you have the self-interacting patterns, it’s at least possible.
Once again, to be clear, I don’t think physicists would use the term fine-tuning argument for anything. That expression tends to be associated with the “we can’t explain this, therefore God” crowd.
There is a fine-tuning problem in cosmology. But that problem does not rest on excluding alternate combinations of parameter values (perhaps there are very many such combinations) that might allow for “life” in the broadest sense. The question is what proportion of parameter values have this property? And if string theory’s lack of constraint on parameter values is correct, it seems to be true that the overwhelming majority of combinations of parameter values are inconsistent with life.
Hence the multiverse idea. Or, if ours is the only universe, the need for an explanation for why our apparently “lucky” set of values occurred - perhaps some other as-yet unknown model.
Photons have wavelength and spin angular momentum which can be used to distinguish them a bit. Gravitons don’t have these properties or are you excluding such properties in terms of distinguishability?
I’m not quite sure what distinction you are drawing.
Our universe has a set of parameter values that allow life to exist. But we have no model for making universes that constrains the parameters; our best models (our only models) allow a vast range of possible parameter values, the overwhelming majority of which are not compatible with life.
Under these circumstances, the anthropic principle is sufficient to explain why we are sitting here looking at a universe compatible with life, but only if universes with all possible parameter values do actually come into existence.
But the multiverse hypothesis has a deeper foundation than just this point, it has a well-developed theoretical basis - it arises naturally from these models of inflation & string theory. (Without any empirical support whatsoever, of course.)
Exactly so. In math, it’s called “probability density,” which is just a fancy way of saying that, even among infinite sets, some subsets are “bigger” than others.
If you rolled a pair of dice an infinite number of times…yes, you’d get an infinite number of 7s and an infinite number of 2s (snake-eyes.) Nevertheless, there will be six times as many 7s as there are 2s, or, perhaps more accurately, the distribution of the 7s is six times as dense as the distribution of 2s.
