As much as many ALifers hate emphasizing their research’s applications, the attempts to create artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be considered ALife’s cousin in that researchers in both fields are enamored by a concept called open-ended evolution (演化). This is the capacity for a system to create essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of “novelty generator”. The only system known to exhibit this is Earth’s biosphere. If the field of ALife manages to reproduce life’s endless “creativity” in some virtual model, those same principles could give rise to truly inventive machines.

According to the Solar Energy Industry Association, the number of solar panels installed(安装)has grown rapidly in the past decade, and it has to grow even faster to meet climate goals. But all of that growth will take up a lot of space, and though more and more people accept the concept of solar energy, few like large solar panels to be installed near them.

Solar developers want to put up panels as quickly and cheaply as possible, so they haven’t given much thought to what they put under them. Often, they’ll end up filling the area with small stones and using chemicals to control weeds. The result is that many communities, especially in farming regions, see solar farms as destroyers of the soil.

“Solar projects need to be good neighbors,” says Jordan Macknick, the head of the Innovative Site Preparation and Impact Reductions on the Environment (InSPIRE)project. “They need to be protectors of the land and contribute to the agricultural economy.” InSPIRE is investigating practical approaches to “low-impact” solar development, which focuses on establishing and operating solar farms in a way that is kinder to the land. One of the easiest low-impact solar strategies is providing habitat for pollinators(传粉昆虫).

Habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change have caused dramatic declines in pollinator populations over the past couple of decades, which has damaged the U.S. agricultural economy. Over 28 states have passed laws related to pollinator habitat protection and pesticide use. Conservation organizations put out pollinator-friendliness guidelines for home gardens, businesses, schools, cities—and now there are guidelines for solar farms.

Over the past few years, many solar farm developers have transformed the space under their solar panels into a shelter for various kinds of pollinators, resulting in soil improvement and carbon reduction. “These pollinator-friendly solar farms can have a valuable impact on everything that’s going on in the landscape,” says Macknick.

Everything we know suggests that the universe is unusual. It is flatter, smoother, larger and emptier than a “typical” universe predicted by the known laws of physics. If we reached into a hat filled with pieces of paper, each with the specifications of a possible universe written on it, it is unlikely that we would get a universe anything like ours in one pick—or even a billion.

The challenge that cosmologists face is to make sense of this specialness. One approach to this question is inflation—the hypothesis (假设) that the early universe went through a stage of fast expansion. At first, inflation seemed to do the trick. A simple version of the idea gave correct predictions for the spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

But a closer look shows that we have just moved the problem further back in time. To make inflation happen at all requires us to fine-tune the initial conditions of the universe. And unless inflation is highly tuned, it leads to a runaway process of universe creation. As a result, some cosmologists (宇宙学家) suggest that there is not one universe, but an infinite number, with a huge variety of properties: the multiverse. There are an infinite number of universes in the collection that are like our universe and an infinite number that are not. But the proportion of infinity to infinity is undefined, and can be made into anything the theorist wants. Thus, the multiverse theory has difficulty making any firm predictions and threatens to take us out of the area of science.

These other universes are unobservable and because chance dictates the random distribution of properties across universes, suggesting the existence of a multiverse does not let us get to anything about our universe beyond what we already know. As attractive as the idea may seem, it is basically a sleight of hand, which turns an explanatory failure into an apparent explanatory success. The success is empty because anything that might be observed about our universe could be explained as something that must, by chance, happen somewhere in the multiverse.

We started out trying to explain why the universe is so special, and we end up being asked to believe that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes with random properties. This makes me suspect that there is a basic but unexamined assumption about the laws of nature that must be overturned.

Cosmology has new questions to answer. Not just what are the laws, but why are these laws the laws? How were they chosen? We can’t just hypothesize what the initial conditions were at the big bang, we need to explain those initial conditions. Thus, we are in the position of a computer program asked to explain its inputs. It is clear that if we are to get anywhere, we need to invent new methods, and perhaps new kinds of laws, to gain a scientific description of the universe as a whole.