If the results of the first LHC run are not betraying us, many decades of particle physics are culminating in a complete and consistent theory for all nongravitational physics: the standard model. But despite this monumental achievement there is a clear sense of disappointment: many questions remain unanswered. Remarkably, most unanswered questions could just be environmental, and disturbingly to some the existence of life may depend on that environment. Meanwhile there has been increasing evidence that the seemingly ideal candidate for answering these questions, string theory, gives an answer few people initially expected: a large “landscape” of possibilities that can be realized in a multiverse and populated by eternal inflation. At the interface of “bottom-up” and “top-down” physics, a discussion of anthropic arguments becomes unavoidable. Developments in this area are reviewed, focusing especially on the last decade.

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