It would have been harder 150 years ago to bake bread or a cake to perfection. There were no thermometers in the oven, few clocks to tell how long it was in the oven, no real way to regulate the heat. It was an art as much as a science.

That idea of being baked just right comes to mind when I think about our universe. So many things had to be just right to ‘cook up’ our existence. If we live in a multiverse with countless other universes, it is likely most of them would harbour conditions impossible for a planet like earth to exist. This is for some people a way to reconcile their belief in an omnipotent and omnipresent God. For without the divine intervention of a ‘designer’ we could not exist.

But for me this is simply a game of numbers. In the billions of universes in a multiverse, we were the lottery winners. We won the grand prize of being able to harbour consciousness in a universe among so many others that did not have the right ingredients, did not have the right conditions, and/or were baked for too long or not long enough.

We exist because our universe was baked just right. And the fact that it was right enough for us, suggests to me that it is right enough on another not-so-near-by planet. We probably aren’t alone in this universe, but our universe is probably lonely in comparison to other universes.

We might not be the only one, but just like we are alone in our galaxy, our university is probably alone in being baked to perfection… for us. Maybe there are some nitrogen breathing conscious beings in another universe writing about the crazy possibility of oxygen breathing beings in a universe like ours?

We probably won’t need a couple hundred more years to figure this out. We are too inquisitive and we keep looking out into the universe and asking complex questions beyond my understanding. What I do understand is that we live in a universe that was baked well enough to produce us, and while we may not be baked to perfection, we are the lottery winners (or likely one of very few lottery winners) in the multiverse.