Sailing the Archipelago

We live on a small island. We have not yet ventured much beyond our immediate locale on this small island; even our own inconspicuous location still holds great mysteries for us. It seems that we find ourselves near the mountain peak on our island, but even that is uncertain. Only recently we have discovered that there are other islands besides our home scattered in a vast (possibly infinite) ocean. And the ocean is dead. It is not just devoid of fishes, algae or anything similar – it is empty of any conceivable form of life, it epitomizes the absence of life itself. But recently we have made our first attempt at mapping our surroundings and, in particular, sketching the outline of the ocean shores. In this, some of us bear similarities to the great adventurers of the European Age of Exploration in XV and XVI centuries; only in this case the explorers are not sea-captains and conquistadors, but theoretical physicists, cosmologists and philosophers.

The Archipelago of habitability – the set of habitable domains in the multiverse – seems to be a useful metaphor which puts our efforts on elucidation the relationship of astrobiology and cosmology in a wider perspective. It offers directions for tight interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists interested in properties of life and those interested in a grand-scale structure of physical reality. It also offers great opportunities for philosophers – notably to generalize the classical anthropic reasoning to the entire Archipelago, where all teleological and other unnecessary baggage is explicitly discarded. The relationship between the Archipelago and other multiverses containing intelligent observers considered in both philosophical (e.g., Lewis 1986) and scientific literature remains to be elaborated. We may also expect a true Age of Exploration of this Archipelago.

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