I think in the past I would’ve readily accepted this explanation but now it seems to me like a just-so story. Bacteria can exhibit doubling times on the scale

I think in the past I would’ve readily accepted this explanation but now it seems to me like a just-so story. Bacteria can exhibit doubling times on the scale of tens of minutes. We know of trees that live for thousands of years. On the other hand, we know of chemical reactions that can propagate significantly faster that the speed of sound (high explosives) and nuclear reactions that propagate even faster that this. At the other end of the scale, we have mildly radioactive elements with half-lives measured in billions of years. This is all to say that everything is relative and no matter what constants you choose for the universe, they’re going to seem arbitrary.