I subscribe to the anthropic principle for meaning-of-life-type questions. If I had to describe it in as few words as possible, I’d steal from Rob Bryanton (@10thdim of Twitter) and say “the reason we’re here is because we’re here.” However, I have a bit more room than that, so I’ll try to give it a shot.

The list of criteria for a planet to produce life of the complexity seen on ours is rather long and complex. For it to be produced be random chance, the probability is minuscule. People have produced manifold reasons as to the occurrence of, well, us, from the nihilist to the spiritualist.

The anthropic principle, however, simply remarks thus: The reason we’re here to observe the universe is because every physically possible universe does, in fact, exist. The ones that don’t include us just haven’t developed observers to document it. The universe around us exists because we exist to observe it, just as we exist because the universe has generated the conditions for life.

If you go to YouTube and search for “the anthropic viewpoint 10thdim” you’ll find Rob Bryanton’s song about it, with links to him talking about it. I think he phrases it better than I do.