-The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 135.
"'...I do not blandly consider that all worked out for the best. Had it not been for that damned war and its aftermath, we might stand here amidst flowering gardens and know that our people had already reached the stars.'
"'We would not exist,' said Orna prosaically.
"Danivar laughed. 'True. The trend of events must ever seem toward the best, since it is toward the one observing the trend.'"
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World (London, 1984), Epilogue, p. 179.
The evolution that led to us is important to us but that does not make it inevitable and evidence shows that it was extremely improbable. We are back in Time Patrol territory.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I feel the same way about what happened in Sarajevo and its consequences in 1914 as Orna does about the, so far mercifully fictional WW III of his timeline/history!
Ad astra! Sean
History is contingent; that includes evolutionary history.
The dinosaurs dis not 'die out', for example.
They were massacred by an asteroid impact. Most of the mass extinction events have some sort of extraneous cause.
These -kick- evolution onto a new path.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That is true, and I think similar things nearly happened to hominins/humans a time or two.
Ad astra! Sean
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