QED. To put it another way, "life" is basically a quine. As per the fixed-point theorem, all Turing-complete formal systems support (infinitely many) quines. T

QED. To put it another way, "life" is basically a quine. As per the fixed-point theorem, all Turing-complete formal systems support (infinitely many) quines. Therefore, any universe whose laws of physics are powerful enough to support Turing-completeness, can support life. (Of course you have to be careful with what you mean by "life" and "universe" and so forth. A 0-dimensional infinitesimal singularity capable of arbitrary computation can of course run Conway's Game Of Life all you want - but perhaps you'd prefer 'universe' to mean some kind of spatial construction with locality-preserving rules - in which case it's not even clear that our own universe counts!)