I don't quite see what the big deal is. We don't need String Theory or an Intelligent Designer to understand this, and the idea that 99% of the time life is impossible and seeing any meaning in that is just a "momentary lapse of reason" to quote Pink Floyd. It's merely a circular argument, an illusion because we happen live in this time...put less kindly "philosophical masturbation".

How different is this from asking yourself "Had my mother and father not met, I would not be alive. Had my father procreated with another women or my mother with another man, I would not have been born and thus I would not be alive. Thus, for 100% of other combinations of human partners, they 'might' lead to another life, but certainly not 'ME'"

For most of the past time of the universe, Carbon Based (CB) life was impossible. For most of the future time of the universe, CB life will again be impossible. As a matter of fact, if the universe truly is flat and ever expanding, then as the universes age approaches infinity, the window where CB life is sustainable approaches zero, thus making this universe devoid of life and asymptotically raising the probability that life doesn't exist in this universe to 100%.

As a matter of fact, consider these other balancing acts that the universe shows us:





Is there some paradox here? For most of these rocks lifetimes, they were either unbalanced or something else. In the future, there is a 100% probability that they will become unbalanced, either directly or by erosion. Like life in this universe, like us, we just happen to live in a time where there is this balance, but we should keep in mind that this is a very narrow view of the entire history of the universe.

And I agree with Whine that this whole dicussion is grossly ethnocentric and assumes that CB life is teh only type of life. We have no way of knowing there isn't some other form of life that can evolve in the quark-gluon plasma at the birst of the universe nor can we say with certainty that life won't evolve into something else in the cold, dark ends of time.