Our view of the world was formed in a nursery.

Imagine a small child, old enough to think about her world, but too young to test ideas about all of it, beyond what she can see and feel, what she can expect to happen every day.

She develops the idea that her world is a swell place: cookies are brought to her, toys are provided, light is plentiful, warmth and affection are volunteered. For no apparent reason other than her exalted worth.

She does have a special gift: to reason, despite her disadvantages of age and size and experience. She sorts out concepts for what she experiences: she notes the actions of her breath and heart, and decides they exist to keep her alive, and more: they are perfect for this task.

Obviously, since she is happily alive.

Her breath takes in what is "out there", so what is out there is also perfect. She sleeps, and this just comes over her, so it is the world keeping her fit. When she awakes, she is refreshed, and food is near.

We are, as a species, in a nursery whose rarity is unfathomably, heartbreakingly, the principal fact of our observable universe.

The universe is demonstrably not friendly to life. Even here on earth we need only take that child to the garage, or the roof, or out to the yard, and let her fend for herself for one day, to show her the delusion of her beliefs.

Out of love, the imperative of our species toward our young, we do not, but as adults we experience the bittersweetness of perspective, knowing that she is inches from discomfort, yards from peril, mere miles from horror and grief.

The true, real world.

We must, if we are to be adults, observe and learn and reason, step outside our comfort, and we find that 20 yards above us is still the universe, but death as we fall and break. Slip away from shore and we can only carve temporary safety, with technology. Drill under the earth, set up housekeeping, and wait for clammy and dark oblivion.

Leave earth -- our nursery -- and the true nature of the universe asserts itself. Emptiness, mostly frozen, more and more emptiness, punctuated at the rarest intervals by hellish, radiation-saturated, roiling furnaces.

Inevitably (even here, in our nursery), every marginally temperate place is obliterated in the mindless, explosive deaths and rebirths of idiotic gas.

We simply fail to see past our our sunny windows, comfortable carpet, and ready nourishment. The argument from "intelligent design", and the belief of many New Age adherents -- that we exist improbably, because of exquisitely shaded and finessed physical values -- is just a variation of the transcendent rapture clouding monks' minds, who finally settle how many cherubim can be invited to their pinhead dance.

To assemble complex nuances for and resolve details about an untruth -- that the universe is friendly to us -- does not magically make it true.

Childhood cancer, senile dementia, our lousy knee architecture, the blind spot in our eye: none would exist in a truly human life-friendly universe.

Here's a friendly universe: we would, in special variations, live in airless worlds like the moon, on gas giants, on suns, or heck, in space itself, without limitations. Life would teem from world to world, adapting readily.

Each galactic core, (including our Milky Way), rich, resource-filled regions of radiation and heat and turmoil, would be nurturing complex varieties of organisms.

What if we are simply ignorant? What if we are just another infestation on the thin carboniferous skin of another backwater globe, a scrim of bipedal mold, pathetic and bold and deluded?

What if the universe DOES have abundant life, but burning, semi-sentient, and hugely scaled, associated with those galactic cores? They would believe, more legitimately than we, that the universe IS life-oriented.

Imagine one of them strays into our neighborhood, away from the rich harvests of hydrogen that sustains her. Before fleeing back to safety, she hears us describe OUR world as proof of cosmic, beneficent support.

She would shake her glowing, particle-rich head in amazement at such sad little-brain, self-absorbed creatures as we.

There are popular strains of related metaphysical thoughts, mostly on the left, but they find a home across all classes, positions, cultures. Their essential fallacy, the core idea that is their engine, is that energy is a beneficent, fluxuous plasma of some kind, that "wants" us, "empowers" goodness itself, and adheres to us, especially if we do This or That.

Believers of such make much ado about particles and quantum and energy, waving hands around micro-effects and laws to conjure up support for macro actions and processes. We hear the "spooky action" shibboleth. They gush about water memory, and auras, and karma as a physical law.

This is at best misdirection. The rules of engagement at the particle and sub-particle level bear scant resemblance to our nursery world's laws. They profoundly contradict them, and often. They are so difficult to imagine that our most talented thinkers assert we cannot truly relate them to everyday processes, even abstractly, with any real effectiveness.

Such simple science alone should suffice to unravel metaphysical arguments, but there is a more profound truth: what happens at the subatomic, STAYS at the subatomic.

There is no known mechanism, real or theoretical, that survives scrutiny, for how the rubbing of electron shells or the properties of neutrinos, or the Plank constant, can ACT, in either time or space, to affect or be affected, in order to make us a nursery, or adjust the temperature, or, absurdly, retrofit the universe for us.

Such chutzpah, to think these mindless principles and physical properties themselves can or "want to" bend to our comfort. Inane. Energy  is, operationally, essentially, profoundly, potential work. Not sublime and human-loving super-glue.

That feeling that courses through us when we fall in love? The sense of universal connectivity we wallow in during meditation or kundalini yoga or when we watch our grandmother kiss our new-born nephew? The eerie feeling of coincidences, especially when they (inevitably*) work FOR us at times? Just biology, and circumstances. Why is is this even the tiniest bit inadequate?

It is as if we notice that grass, when trod upon, is resilient, and survives abuse, so therefore "wants" us to win the football game and beat the Raiders. Or that rocks can be stacked, so therefore granite had in mind our Brooklyn Bridge, and delicious Indian food on the Brooklyn side. Yum.

We live in a pitiless cosmos, where to even introduce the concept of pity needlessly adorns it. We are, if anything, lucky, lucky, lucky. Celebrate that we have a nursery, discover all that is within and without this beautiful vale, but please, let's not waste any more time on how the universe likes us, it really, really likes us.

* statistically, it would be weird if there weren't coincidences, and the occassional extraordinary one. duh.

_____________________________

^{All pictures from the history-changing Hubble telescope.}