Oh yeah, it needs a desktop. I wouldn’t even try on a phone. Good luck on the school run - one oh them big yeller buses? - and assignment.
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Dja like the masterful T.S. Elliot ref?
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@Klax , thank you! That was fun! The navigation tools helped a lot.
In brief:1
The universe, I suppose any universe, is a busy place. Lots of cool (and hot and radioactive, etc) stuff going on.
(With or without Elliot’s or anyone else’s cats – or possums for that matter.)
Bus has come and gone. 
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And to the question of the OP:
I stick with my inappropriate counter-question from earlier in the thread: Is it simply generous?
Waste implies meaning that is irrelevant to space or the universe. What it is is as it is. Is there lack? “Waste” implies lack or potential lack. There seems to be no lack in the cosmos, no matter how it is conceived.
“Goldilocks” (if directly related to the story, not simply relying on “just right”) as well, implies meaning other than what is usually implied by its uses in apologetics. She relied on things already in existence that just happened to work well for her. If we stick to the story itself and the meaning the story implies, than, even an atheist might say, “Why yes.”
So, the question in the OP doesn’t exactly get at what I expect is intended, and I’m being contrarian. While I have a view on the matter, I don’t think its provable by any means we have to hand.
This was refreshing and a little frustrating to read. Thank you. It’s transformative to have people from the other culture, whom we value as people, in our lives. And to listen to them, even when we don’t understand everything they say. Learning to value them helps us learn to value that they understand other things. Snow’s challenges (and interpretation of their meanings) are wonderful.
Have you read any of his novels? If so, what did you think?
FOOTNOTES
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Do kids over there subvert their literature teachers’ reading assignments by using Cliff’s Notes?
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Yes, it was the big, yellow bus (not taxi) with flashing lights on a country road. I forgot to bring the camera to snap you a photo. The emoji will have to do for now.
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You’ll have to read my reply. I just posted it. Much formatting
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Nature is infinitely eternally fecund, it spawns universes, octopuses, rose bay willow herb like it, she doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, like she dies tonight. The Kondensed Kliffs Notes are a fine perspective on history (5000 years), but if one steps up and back logarithmically six steps it becomes a lot of the same things happened from every perspective.
God (or ‘God’) changes not.
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Kliff’s editor could have left out the “different” for brevity and maintained accuracy.
What’s with Boltzmann’s brain?!
Bloody nonsense if you ask me. Think of the most unlikely random universal configuration of quantum noise, a single mind, the insane number is how long it would take to happen.
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Thanks! That’s a relief to hear. The real stuff is strange enough. A disembodied brain….well, it worked for L’engle. But I don’t know that any other author could even make a decent story around it.
Hoyle and Lem are each other’s peer only.
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More to look up and read. Learning, learning.
The Black Cloud and Solaris respectively. The latter filmed twice. The Hollywood version stand alone is OK. But nothing compared to the Soviet original, which is No. 1 (vying with Blade Runner and The Tree of Life).
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Of this group, i only saw BR. I would have been 15, so I don’t remember much, except that I liked it. These are probably all worth looking into, plus the SO group you’ve mentioned elsewhere. Thanks again.
[Edited 2022.11.23 10:19 EST]
@Klax , not sure this will work, editing months later, but thank you for the recommendation for Solaris (1972). I finally found it on yootoob, and watched it in about 4 sections. It was great. Themes of resurrection seem to bombard these days.
Hari looked uncannily like my younger cousin, who was adopted from Russia. This is a eerie phenomenon that happens pretty often, at least to me, with so may foreignly adopted orphans in my family.
Thanks for Solaris.
Dilettante gadfly poseur that I am, I have only heard him dramatized compellingly on BBC radio. He’s on my list. I recall a Snowesque New Scientist critique of modern literary fiction writers who use scientific references and was stung by its take on William Boyd’s superb Brazzaville Beach. At least it left Ian Banks alone.
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I need to start a list of authors, titles, movies, wikipedia pages……Snow’s interest in science in fiction sounds interesting. My first lit crit prof was actually very interested in that, although I’ll expand it to include technology. I was fascinated by it each time I’ve read Dracula. The simple little old typewriter! And in the hands of a woman. Revolutionary.
Beware, Banks can be terribly bleak. I actually felt La Nausée with him all too frequently. Never read Stoker. Anne Rice was too much!
I’m muscling up to get a DVD of Solaris director Tarkovsky’s Stalker which is a film of the Strugatsky brothers’ yearning Roadside Picnic.
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Stoker’s fun. Nice, journal-based structure to the novel, so all main perspectives are first person. Delightful contrast and interplay between modern and premodern within a modern context. Each confounding the other for a while.
Never read Rice.
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Technical question: Would first life be much later? If it started 4by/14by ago then it wasn’t here until about 10by/14by time frame? Yes? So starting more like Sept/Oct.
It is an interesting timeframe of fitting it into a year. We humans seem to think of all big numbers as pretty much the same - a big number.
doo doo DOO! DOO! doo doo DOO! DOO!
That was Ussher’s time of year!
Yes you are correct, thank you. I should have went days from the end in the calculation I think, not the beginning. I will fix the graphic tomorrow!
If you follow the Snow quote link on The Second Law of Thermodynamics, you will get to Goldilocks : )
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