Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?

Life exists in our universe. There we go - one hopefully uncontroversial statement. Therefore our universe is capable of producing and supporting life. How am I going? Two for two? Let’s try for three: therefore there are countless universes. Hmmm. Did I break my streak?

Our universe seems to operate according to a set of fundamental rules that we try to understand and model with the equations of our laws of physics. Those equations always include one or more fundamental constants - simple numbers that set the scale for the equation. We can’t determine the values of these constants from pure theory - we have to measure them in the real universe. These are things like the speed of light, the Planck constant, the masses of the elementary particles, and the constants defining the relative strengths of the fundamental forces - the so-called coupling constants.