Inflation and initial conditions in the pre-big bang scenario

The pre-big bang scenario describes the evolution of the Universe from an initial state approaching the flat, cold, empty, string perturbative vacuum. The choice of such an initial state is suggested by the present state of our Universe if we accept that the cosmological evolution is (at least partially) duality-symmetric. Recently, the initial conditions of the pre-big bang scenario have been criticized as they introduce large dimensionless parameters allowing the Universe to be "exponentially large from the very beginning". We agree that a set of initial parameters (such as the initial homogeneity scale, the initial entropy) different from those determined by the initial horizon scale, $H^{-1}$, would be somewhat unnatural to start with. However, in the pre-big bang scenario, the initial parameters are all controlled by the size of the initial horizon. The basic question thus becomes: is the initial state necessarily unnatural if the curvature scale is small and, consequently, $H^{-1}$ is very large in Planck (or string) units? In the impossibility of experimental information one could exclude "a priori" a large horizon as a natural initial condition, thus accepting the fact that inflation is natural only when starting at the Planck curvature scale. In the pre-big bang scenario, however, pre-Planckian initial conditions are not necessarily washed out by inflation and are accessible (in principle) to observational tests, so that their naturalness could be also analyzed with a Bayesan approach, in terms of "a posteriori" probabilities.