CBC Massey Lectures 2287 Philosopher Karl Gyekye reading, "Unlikely Places" University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. Religious leaders cite the odds against the formation of living worlds like Earth as evidence of the divine. A higher power must be at work for such places to be possible, how else could these odds be overcome? And these odds are indeed huge. Factors include temperature; medial materials must be liquid, mass; too little and no atmosphere, too much and material stratification occurs, ionizing radiation; a mutative process depends on the influx of high energy photons but too much causes break down of complex chemical structures, satellites; no satellites and there is too much meteor bombardment, too many bodies and stable tidal patterns do not occur, the list goes on. Scientifically, one expects odds of the order of ten million to one against a biosphere. Strange then that the rate of living worlds is more like one in six hundred. Filtering out the biospheres which stagnate at molecular life and the rate is still a remarkable one in two thousand. Intellectually, it is tempting to take the easiest explanation in the face of these details and ascribe creation to a deity or deities. Ironically, most religions urge their followers to resist temptation in all things. Modernists alternately point to superior alien civilizations as a rational and material substitute for gods. An assertion, I should point out, that is not supported by the objective recorded history of these societies. But the principle is the same. Countering the philosophical thesis of intelligent design, mathematicians, fractalists and quantum physicists point to the power of statistics being just as omnipotent in the mesoscale as gravity and electromagnetism. They say that the mere existence of expansive chaos will necessitate the existence of small, localized zones of high order complexity. The classic image of a Mandelbrot set (my daughter likes to call it paisley) gives substance to this argument. A series of highly complex, repeating structures like an island cluster set in an ocean. These structures, several small entities surrounding one major object, all have infinitely small detail formed from a few simple mathematical rules. The biospheres of Earth and Europa can be seen to conform to this frame work. As do, apparently, many other places in the galaxy, the most striking being a system dubbed Freya's Necklace. With the power of mathematics working in your favour, who needs a deity? The statistical thesis also neatly explains the preponderance of "failed" worlds in the cosmos. Why would a god or superior alien civilization go through the trouble of creating so many failures for every apparent living world? Why not make them all alive, if you have the powers? But what is failure? It is my belief that our sciences and philosophies have been lazy in their understanding of what it is to not succeed. We now know that the eldest alien civilizations, the Reds, posses technologies described as "tooling". I concede that "technology" is a poor descriptor of tooling, but to simplify this analysis let's ignore that point at this stage. Tooling is the means to manipulate time such that one can select a desired outcome prior to embarking upon a specific project. To quote the 20th Century author Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". And this power does seem like magic, perhaps God-like - almost. Almost because, in spite of foreknowledge of all events within a project, tooling can still manage to fail. Its average rate of failure is 1.47% as measured through a linear temporal context. In higher temporal dimensions the failure rate expands exponentially. Losing 95% confidence after four dimensions and guaranteeing failure above eleven dimensions. It is this acknowledgment of "guaranteed failure" that I find intriguing. Certainly it goes beyond the uncertainty principles of which we are familiar but could we consider it a fundamental force? ...