Indeed; once one understands that failure comes with a whimper not a bang, the history of our own world seems to me to contain quite a few _just barely_s, from a planet barely large enough to evolve sentient life, to quirks of psychology that led people to make advances the benefits of which could not have been apparent at the time. This story sums it up pretty nicely.
Ouch. That just made the anthropic principle real for me.
Indeed; once one understands that failure comes with a whimper not a bang, the history of our own world seems to me to contain quite a few _just barely_s, from a planet barely large enough to evolve sentient life, to quirks of psychology that led people to make advances the benefits of which could not have been apparent at the time. This story sums it up pretty nicely.
Those quirks of psychology do seem like a rather big ‘just barely’.