How seriously do string theorists take the "landscape" The string theory landscape seems to this outside observer to be  an intermediate step in the intellectual progress toward a more robust theory that explains why our one universe has the particular properties that it has. is this the majority opinion or do most string theorists view the landscape as a plausibly being included in the final form of the theory?
 A: I don't know about other people, but the notion that there is a unique 4d solution for our universe I find a little preposterous--- the situation is exactly the same as for Newtonian mechanics and the solar system--- the solar system has many different possible configurations, you can't predict that Jupiter will be this and such size at this and such a distance, but you can predict general features, and find the general laws.
It is not possible that string theory will be shown to uniquely predict our universe, since it allows for 11 dimensional stable vacuum, along with 10 dimensional ones, and so on. So the landscape isn't going away. In point of fact, the landscape was already appreciated by Scherk and Schwarz in the 1970s, when they did toroidal compactifications, but it was politically inconvenient, since it suggested that it will be difficult to predict experimental results from string theory. Because of this, some people kept on saying that the theory has a unique vacuum well into the 1990s, although this was already clear in 1977.
A: That there are multiple possible solutions isn't seriously questioned, but I note this recent paper The Top $10^{500}$ Reasons Not to Believe in the Landscape. This is not questioning the existance of $10^{500}$ solutions, but it is questioning the interpretation as a landscape. Specifically the paper claims the solutions are entirely separate and you cannot have transitions between solutions within it.
