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Milky Way not unusual, astronomers find
- guiriduro 5y agowell, that's a relief.
- bastawhiz 5y agoExcept for all the people, anyway.
- Thev00d00 5y agoWell, as far we know
- tcldr 5y agoI always find it interesting that people expect Human existence, and therefore the environment for its emergence, is somehow atypical. I don't know the math, but I would have thought by definition, one would wager on it being typical.
- bserge 5y agoPeople are desperate to believe that something makes them special. Probably the reason most marketing works :)
- GPerson 5y agoIn your view, what would it mean to be special?
- simonh 5y agoOnly having a sample of one makes it very hard to say for sure. Let's say sapient life is very common and the vast majority of such species live on fairly similar planets in similar galaxies. In that situation, you would expect a random sample of one species to be typical. On the other hand suppose typical planets in typical systems are generally very hostile to evolving sapient life. Only very unusual circumstances can lead to suitable conditions, but there are many, many different ways that can happen and different untypical conditions that can lead to sapience arising. Well, then a sample of one simply can't tell you anything about typical sapient species, because there's no such thing. Looking at our conditions, I think there are worrying signs that out specific conditions are actually very unusual. Almost none of the extra-solar planetary systems we've found look much at all like our solar system. Furthermore we have a weirdly large moon relative to the size of our planet, which has had a huge effect on the tectonic and atmospheric development of our planet. Historically our global climatic conditions have oscillated quite widely, but always somehow managed to escape falling permanently into an extreme state. All of this seems to be very unlikely and atypical.
- Pompidou 5y agoIn the same way, each individual think himself as atypical. Like if our own narrative, what we think ourself about ourself, was de facto a teratology.
- nimithryn 5y agoUnder some models, there’s a non-negligible chance that humans are atypical. See this paper by Sanders, Drexler, and Ord, for instance. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf
- sixbrx 5y agoNote that this relates to its collision history not being special as it relates to thin/thick disk. I believe the Milky Way is still thought to be atypically large for a spiral galaxy, well above the median size. It's small compared to the large ellipticals like M87 but they are relatively rare. Be proud that we live in a major spiral!
- lostmsu 5y agoInspection paradox? https://towardsdatascience.com/the-inspection-paradox-is-everywhere-2ef1c2e9d709 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-inspection-paradox-is-eve...