  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) larger than 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 bounded by the size of the initial
horizon. The basic question thus becomes: is a maximal homogeneity scale of
order H^{-1} necessarily unnatural if the initial curvature 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", for
large horizons, the maximal homogeneity scale H^{-1} as a natural initial
condition. 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.
