Universe Design 101

Universe Design 101 - Major Project

Task: Create a universe featuring intelligent beings made in your own likeness and demonstrating the elements of Intelligent Design

Student: God

Markers comments:Your project was certainly ambitious, interesting and generally beautiful, however it falls short on a number of important elements.

• Scale - it is important when you are an omnipotent creator to resist the temptation to show off. I don't want to discourage your obvious enthusiasm for Astronomy, and all those galaxies are certainly aesthetically pleasing, but was it really necessary to create 200 billion of them, each containing billions of individual stars?
• Proportion and Focus - the ambitious scale of your project has led to an imbalance in proportion and a lack of focus. Intelligent beings were supposed to be the central feature of your universe. Your decision to confine them to a small planet orbiting a dull star in a nondescript galaxy suggests that, rather than being the purpose of your universe, you added the unfortunate beings as afterthought.
• Elements of intelligent design - This is the area in which your project really falls down and I hardly know where to start:

• Your life forms are often intriguing and complex but you really should put a lot more effort into prototyping and testing. Since you submitted your project over 99% of the species have become extinct!
• What on Earth made you think venereal diseases were a good idea?
• The Dodo - were you serious?
• Your intelligent beings were supposed to be the centrepiece of your project, but you seem to have cobbled the design together at the last minute. Why plumb their sewer pipes through their recreational areas? Why force mothers to squeeze melon-sized babies out through a grapefruit sized pelvis? Why put the wiring for the eye straight through the middle of the sensor? And their lower backs constitute just about the worst design for a lever/pivot system that I've seen in an eternity of marking these projects. You're just not thinking these things through, lad!

• Other comments -
  • fossils, radiometrically old rocks etc. - these are nice touches and I have to admit that I did have a bit of chuckle watching the poor creatures getting so confused about where they came from and when. Keep up the good work.
  • free will - also a nice touch, better than the boringly deterministic ideas like 'karma' that other students came up with. Unfortunately, it does seem to have the tendency to spawn selfishness. You really needed to balance it with better designed 'common sense'. What's the point of giving your creations the free will to destroy themselves, the selfishness to make this self-annihilation inevitable, without the common sense to avoid it? Makes your whole project feel a bit 'temporary' really, doesn't it? 
  • heaven and hell - These ideas have merit, they are certainly in more interesting than the endlessly tedious cycles of death and rebirth submitted by some of your classmates, but you have failed to develop these concepts to their potential. Would anybody really want to spend eternity surrounded by a bunch of pious goody-two-shoes? Zeus had a similar idea but spiced it up with lots of drunken orgies. Even Allah had the foresight to throw in a few virgins. By comparison, your Heaven just looks dull, dull, dull 
  • Your Hell on the other hand I like, though you may have gone over the top a little. The threat of too much fire and brimstone does run the risk of turning your beings into sycophantic little toadies, and eternity is a very long time.

Summary - an ambitious attempt but sadly lacking in proportion and attention to detail.

 Mark: C- (resubmit)