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Luke_A_Somers comments on The Sin of Underconfidence - Less Wrong
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Even in the case of a single infinite universe, the anthropic principle does help - it means that any arbitrarily low success rate for forming life is equally acceptable, so long as it is not identically zero.
In that case, it would look like the universal constants don't support life at all, but you somehow managed to get lucky and survive anyway, rather than the universal constants appearing to be fine-tuned.
If the "universal constants" are different in different areas, then it would basically be a multiverse.
As i understand it, it's possible to pick out even better constants than what we have. For instance, having a fine structure constant between 6 and 7 would cause all atoms with at least 6 protons to be chemically identical to carbon due to 'atomic collapse'. That would probably help life along noticeably.
As things stand, we're pretty marginal. There's a whole lot of not-life out there.
It would probably also completely screw up the triple-alpha process, so that much less carbon will be produced in stars -- assuming stars would be possible in that situation in the first place.
Would that help really? Most life requires all of CHNOPS. And pretty much all complex life requires at least a few heavier elements, especially iron, copper, silicon, selenium, chlorine, magnesium, zinc, and iodine. Life won't do much if one can't get any elements heavier than carbon.
It obviously wouldn't be life exactly as we know it, no! I'm pretty confident that if you replaced all the elements heavier than carbon with carbon, some form of life would be able to emerge. Carbon is where the complexity comes from - everything else is optimization.
Seriously, that's the most blatant case of the failure of imagination fallacy I've seen since I stopped cruising creationist discussion boards.
I'm substantially less convinced. While carbon is the main cause of complexity, that's still carbon with other elements. Your options in this hypothetical are hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron and carbon and that's it. Helium is effectively out (I think, I don't know enough to be that confident that basic bonding behavior will be that similar when you've drastically altered the fine structure constant.) The chemistry for that set isn't nearly as complicated as that involving full CHNOPS. And the relevant question isn't "can life form with these elements" but rather "how likely is it?" and "how likely is complex life to form"?
As I understand it, the vast majority of constants are worse than what we have now. You might be able to find something better, but if this was just chance, we're very lucky as it is. Since you're not usually that lucky, it probably wasn't chance.