Going even further, the late physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008), who coined the term “black hole,” advocated what is now called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): observers are required to bring the universe into existence. Wheeler’s theory says that any pre-life Earth would have existed in an indeterminate state, like Schrödinger’s cat. Once an observer exists, the aspects of the universe under observation become forced to resolve into one state, a state that includes a seemingly pre-life Earth. This means that a pre-life universe can only exist retroactively after the fact of
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