What does it mean to sy: Mobius strip of a parable

I understand that Mobius is a strip with only one side. But I ran into this sentence in a book (The Uninhabitable Earth), which I am not able to comprehend. I am providing the context leading up to the sentence, whose meaning eludes me.

Fatalism has a strong pull in a time of ecological crisis, but even so it is a curious quirk of the Anthropocene that the transformation of the planet by anthropogenic climate change has produced such fervor for Fermi's paradox and so little for its philosophical counterpoint, the anthropic principle. That principle takes the human anomaly not as a puzzle to explain away but as the centerpiece of a grandly narcisstic view of the cosmos. It is the closest thing string-theory physics can bring us to empowering self-centeredness: that however unlikely it may seem that intelligent civilization arose in an infinity of lifeless gas, and however lonely we appear to be in the universe, in fact something like the world we live on and the one we've built are a sort of logical inevitability, given that we asking these questions at all--because only a universe compatible with our sort of conscious life would produce anything capable of contemplating it like this.

This is a Mobius strip of a parable, a sort of gimmicky tautology rather than a truth claim based strictly in observed data. And yet, I think, it is much more helpful than Fermi or Drake in thinking about climate change and the existential challenge of solving it in just the few decades ahead. There is one civilization we know of, and it is still around, and kicking--for now, at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality, or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?

Solution 1:

The prose is very dense and easy to misinterpret but here is one suggestion for understanding the Mobius allusion. I do not claim infallibility!

The Mobius strip (usually taken to be the first and simplest of them, for there are many) has the interesting property that at any point on it there appear to be two sides to the ribbon (the strip). And yet, by walking along one side, it is always possible to reach the other side without ever passing through the strip.

See a picture at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/a-few-of-my-favorite-spaces-the-moebius-strip/

And so it is with the argument developed in the first paragraph (as I unreliably perceive it). Let's start with the anthropic principle - that the universe exists for us. We proceed to the thought that this would seem unlikely to happen in an infinity of lifeless gas. From here we are led to considering that, unlikely or not, we are here, despite any evidence that such a thing would be likely. And that contrast, of our being here in the universe despite evidence that it is a likely thing, is the Fermi paradox.

I believe one could also argue in the reverse direction. And so it is that, without contradicting either, we can move smoothly from the anthropic principle to the Fermi paradox and vice versa, just like traversing a Mobius strip.

Perhaps, simply put, the argument is merely circular: unlikely as it is, we are here - because we are here; and we are here because we are here - unlikely as it is.

"Does your head in", doesn't it? I look forward to any other answers.