Abstract
So far the anthropic principle has mostly yielded statements about cosmology and astrophysics. The arguments employed properties and requirements of life on Earth. Amazingly enough, there is also the converse possibility, that is, to start from astrophysics and apply statements from that to the question of life on Earth. Such a direction of argument seems new and went rather unnoticed by evolutionary biologists. At a conference in London held in 1983 British astronomer Brandon Carter (Observatoire de Paris at Meudon) presented such an argument. In essence he claimed that on the basis of the anthropic principle one could predict that exterrestrial civilizations should be extremely rare — or that life on Earth could even be a unique case.
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Breuer, R. (1991). The Uniqueness of Life: Biology and the Anthropic Principle. In: The Anthropic Principle. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6741-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6741-1_8
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-8176-3482-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-6741-1
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