again, as the no boundary proposal seems to imply, this becomes a question of why we should be in the expanding phase rather than the contracting phase.
One can answer this on the basis of the weak anthropic principle. Conditions in the contracting phase would not be suitable for the existence of intelligent beings who could ask the question: Why is disorder increasing in the same direction of time as that in which the universe is expanding? The inflation in the early stages of the universe, which the no boundary proposal predicts, means that the universe must be expanding at very close to the critical rate at which it would just avoid recollapse, and so will not recollapse for a very long time. By then all the stars will have burned out and the
protons and neutrons in them will probably have decayed into light particles and
