Looking for Life in the Multiverse

" * Multiple other universes—each with its own laws of physics—may have emerged from the same primordial vacuum that gave rise to ours.

* Assuming they exist, many of those universes may contain intricate structures and perhaps even some forms of life.

* These findings suggest that our universe may not be as “finely tuned” for the emergence of life as previously thought.

"Amazingly, the prevailing theory in modern cosmology, which emerged in the 1980s, suggests that such “parallel universes” may really exist—in fact, that a multitude of universes would incessantly pop out of a primordial vacuum the way ours did in the big bang. Our universe would be but one of many pocket universes within a wider expanse called the multiverse. In the overwhelming majority of those universes, the laws of physics might not allow the formation of matter as we know it or of galaxies, stars, planets and life. But given the sheer number of possibilities, nature would have had a good chance to get the “right” set of laws at least once.

Our recent studies, however, suggest that some of these other universes—assuming they exist—may not be so inhospitable after all. Remarkably, we have found examples of alternative values of the fundamental constants, and thus of alternative sets of physical laws, that might still lead to very interesting worlds and perhaps to life. The basic idea is to change one aspect of the laws of nature and then make compensatory changes to other aspects.

Our work did not address the most serious fine-tuning problem in theoretical physics: the smallness of the “cosmological constant,” thanks to which our universe neither recollapsed into nothingness a fraction of a second after the big bang, nor was ripped part by an exponentially accelerating expansion. Nevertheless, the examples of alternative, potentially habitable universes raise interesting questions and motivate further research into how unique our own universe might be."

MUCH more at link (it's Sciam!) but very interesting stuff!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=looking-for-life-in-the-multive...