Multiverse Predictions for Habitability: Number of Potentially Habitable Planets

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how various factors influence the likelihood of habitable planets in the multiverse, analyzing the impact of planetary and stellar properties on habitability probabilities and physical constants.

Contribution

It introduces a multiverse-based framework to assess the importance of planetary characteristics for habitability and explores their effects on fundamental physical constants.

Findings

Presence of planets is common across the multiverse.

Planetary size importance conflicts with certain distribution assumptions.

Temperate zones constrain fundamental constants.

Abstract

How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters habitable? Here, we adopt different stances on the importance of each of these criteria to determine their effects on the probabilities of measuring the observed values of several physical constants. We find that the presence of planets is a generic feature throughout the multiverse, and for the most part conditioning on their particular properties does not alter our conclusions much. We find conflict with multiverse expectations if planetary size is important and it is found to be uncorrelated with stellar mass, or the mass distribution is too steep. The existence of a temperate circumstellar zone places tight lower bounds on the fine structure constant and electron to proton mass ratio.