Sailing the Archipelago
Milan Ćirković
2009-02-12 00:00:00
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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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