Recent studies of cosmology in the presence of a small fundamental
cosmological constant
(hep-th/0208013)
concluded that in that picture
inflation is not the likely path to the state of the current observed
universe. In fact, neither is the standard big bang. In this talk I
scrutinize the failure modes of the standard cosmology in that picture, and
consider 1) Whether these problems are robust in the case of a small
cosmological constant and 2) Whether similar problems might persist in other
frameworks. I also identify the key assumptions about causal patch physics
that cause the problems in the first place.
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