  We discuss a model in which our universe is pictured as a recoiling Dirichlet
brane: we find that a proper treatment of the recoil leads naturally to
supersymmetry obstruction on the four-dimensional world. An essential feature
of our approach is the fact that the underlying worldsheet sigma model is
non-critical, and the Liouville mode plays the role of the target time. Also,
the extra bulk dimensions are viewed as sigma model couplings, and as such have
to be averaged by appropriate summation over worldsheet genera. The recoiling
brane is in an excited state rather than its ground state, to which it relaxes
asymptotically in time, restoring supersymmetry. We also find that the
excitation energy, which is considered as the observable effective cosmological
`constant' on the brane, is naturally small and can accommodate upper bounds
from observations.
