One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.

I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.