the problem of ultimate beginnings than any earlier human society had. Bootstrapping a universe still looks like a logical and metaphysical paradox. We don’t know what Goldilocks conditions allowed a universe to emerge, and we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”7 Threshold 1: Quantum
