“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 consciousness. (Because time is an illusion of consciousness, as we shall see shortly, this whole talk of before and after isn’t strictly correct but provides a way of visualizing things.)”