The Coincidence Number of a Universe & Implications for Life

This paper introduces the Coincidence Numbers, 1Nc , 2Nc, associated with a universe at a given point in time during its evolution, and explores the significance of these numbers in the search for life elsewhere in our universe. The coincidence argument deepens our understanding of human beginnings. Coincidence cannot be thought of as merely luck or accident, an outcome governed by extra-ordinary rules, or even no rules. It occurs not through a rare outcome in a chain of probabilities but in the entanglement of separately developing chains of cause and effect from which a third meaning, likelihood or outcome may be extracted for an observer. Coincidences are unpredictable by definition, though we can make educated guesses about some of them. Yet they exist as the result of an actual property of our world, just like all the other constants that characterise it, and are thus informative about the origins of our universe. By distinguishing between 1NC and 2NC coincidences, this paper will isolate the most important coincidental property for the human narrative. It will examine the question that if other universes exist because of a coincidence of cosmological numbers, then any universe with life must be arranged in such a way as to have at least this class of coincidence? Indeed, the development of consciousness may require a certain density of 2NC coincidences, where random fluctuations in a system (e.g. in the Boltzmann Universe scenarios) are insufficient. This paper will distinguish between accident and coincidence in sub atomic levels of activity and those occurring in the human narrative and the higher levels of consciousness, and will analyse specific properties of coincidence, such as negentropy, to show that a universe's Coincidence Number helps to define the consciousness that lives in it and how that consciousness might develop over time. This paper will show that that once life begins then resistance to damage is one of the significant properties that coincidence gives to life, analogous to ’small-world’ phenomena and to at least the minimum of buffering or inertia in living systems described in Lovelock’s proposals of feedback and self-regulation in Gaia, but distinct from them. By examining the relationship between Coincidence Numbers and consciousness, our understanding of the likelihood of success for the SETI, and the patterns of the spread of life in our universe, will improve.