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If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehe
by andrewstuart 4y ago
If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe.
"Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kevinventullo 4y agoTo be fair, that does seem to describe the existence of life on our own planet.
- andrewstuart 4y agoI don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.
- account-5 4y agoI think they might be referring to the fact the human species seems to think it's exceptional and has a unique place in the universe.
- darwinwhy 4y agoIs that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.
- jenadine 4y agoBut the universe is big and there are billions of billions of other planets which could very well have similar conditions, that also exist for billions of years
- thesuitonym 4y agoWe can't really see at that scale yet. But at the scale we can see, our star system seems to be rather mundane.
- MAGZine 4y agoI suppose it's easier to believe you're a special snowflake than it is to believe you're just average.
- scotty79 4y agoEven though you are unique snowflake there are and will be millions like you. Maybe we are not special. But we can accidentally be one of the first.
- mr_mitm 4y agoThe question isn't about what's easier to believe, it's about what the evidence supports. The probability for life (or multicellular life or intelligent life or technological life) to evolve on any given planet is strictly between 0 and 1. You can believe what you want, but the facts don't support any stronger statement than that.
- denton-scratch 4y agoOur planet is only 4 billion years old; for the first billion years or so, it was sizzling-hot and under constant bombardment.
- throwthrowuknow 4y agoGiven the Copernican principle, yes. I thought we gave up claiming our position as the centre of the universe long ago?
- macrolocal 4y agoProbably the Universe is full of things even more amazing than life as we know it.
- chongli 4y agoEvery star system and planet is rare -- unique, even -- if we're specific enough about the details. The hard part is knowing what details are important when we only have a sample size of 1.
- chasil 4y agoBefore any of that is possible, a "Cambrian Explosion" is required. It may be that prokaryotic life is common, but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge (absent for more than half of the total habitable life of the earth).
- Maursault 4y ago> but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge. Not an expert, but mitochondria didn't "emerge." Mitochondria co-evolved as bacteria, merged and became organelles through complex protein-import machinery and insertion into inner membranes of protein carriers for extracting energy for the host cell.
- chasil 4y agoThere were no eukaryotes... and then there were. This was the ignition of complex, multicellular biology. What else could explain it? I will admit that I thought they were closer to the Cambrian Explosion. This is much farther away than I thought. "Eukaryotes emerged approximately 2.2 billion years ago, during the Proterozoic eon, likely as flagellated phagotrophs." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote
- hinkley 4y agofungi, farming before they were even fungi.
- Maursault 4y agoWhat about mitochondria? I did not address your mention of eukaryotes, only mitochondria, which existed as bacteria long before eukaryotes. You're intentionally ignoring the error in your OP and my pun: mitochondria did not emerge with eukaryotes, they "merged." Your lack of addressing mitochondria in your response makes it a straw man.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoYou are talking about different semantics. You're talking about a merge in the context of a mechanical process, and they are talking about emergence in the context of speciation. There's no reason to expect the verb to be the same if the subject is different.
- duxup 4y ago“Why aren’t we in a galaxy?!?”
- andrewstuart 4y ago"Because we occupy a unique and privileged place in the universe." That would mess with the scientists.
- nequo 4y agoThat is basically what the anthropic principle says: the range of possible observations that we could make about the universe is limited by the fact that observations could only happen in a universe capable of developing intelligent life in the first place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- icambron 4y agoYou can imagine the pivotal moment here, where someone (according to Wikipedia, it was Immanuel Kant, which is a neat fact all by itself) said "hey, that band of faint stars could be a gravitationally rotating disk seen from the inside, and what if those other oblong smudges we see are entire other disks really really far away?" For residents of our hypothetical planet, that moment, which seems very important to me, would be hard to have!
- Helmut10001 4y agoThis is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!
- mach1ne 4y agoI’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?
- mrexroad 4y agoYep. Some good sci-fi. Each one is a bit different, but terrific. Funny enough I was thinking earlier this week that I should re-read them since it’s been a number of years.
- htag 4y agoIt's a three book series. It has a prequel, which adds little to the trilogy. It's highly awarded. It's interesting in that it was originally written in Chinese and it's uncommon for a translated book to make this big of an impact in sci-fi circles. You see it a lot in space conversations because it covers planetary gravity in an interesting way.
- riffraff 4y agoI had a hard time getting through book 1, the other two in the trilogy are easier to read, but they're certainly entertaining and original. It is, somehow, very bleak and pessimistic compared to your average (western?) sci-fi.
- ahonhn 4y agoMakes me think of Krikkit in HHGTTG (from whence the view of the rest of the universe was cut off by a dust cloud. When its inhabitants finally did get to see it their immediate reaction was "It'll have to go")
- mock-possum 4y agoFor a VERY different take on this concept, do yourself a huge favour and read “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov. Just thinking about it sends shivers up my spine.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- legohead 4y agoIf you like such ideas I have a couple good books for you. Not exactly related to this phenomenon but about space...logistics? With regard ET threats especially. [1] The Three-Body Problem (trilogy) [2] A Fire Upon the Deep If you don't want to read the books at least check out the idea of the "Zones of Thought" that is the interesting concept in the second book.
- ww520 4y agoAsimov's Nightfall tells the story of the beings living on a planet surrounded by 6 suns. The sky is always bright with at least a sun over head. They've only known the universe consisted of bright sky and the 6 suns for centuries. On a rare eclipse event where all the suns are hidden, they are suddenly in darkness and looking into billions of stars at the night sky.
- alex_duf 4y agosurely such a system would be extremely unstable right?
- jb1991 4y agoIsaac Asimov is a science fiction author (a good one, too), but the work he created was not a real description of our universe -- it was fiction, and playing with ideas.
- wrvn 4y agoThere actually is a sextuple star system in the night sky. Castor looks like a single star but actually consists of three binary stars: two of them in a binary system that is itself in a binary system with the other binary star. I don't know if there could be a stable position for a planet that would never experience nights, but there is at least some reason behind the idea.
- MaxikCZ 4y agoFor stable, always day position, maybe the planet could be in L1 point between two suns?
- IanCal 4y agoIs Krikkit in HHGTTG a playful take on this?
- andrewflnr 4y agoSince they're pulled together from the intergalactic medium, I'm pretty sure those stars and everything around them are pure hydrogen/helium. You'd need a few generations of star formation/nucleosynthesis before you could have rocky planets and carbon-based life.
- caf 4y agoIt would be a somewhat safer place for life than within a galaxy proper - far less chance of a close approach by another star kicking your planet out of its solar system, less chance of taking a sterilising hit by a close by gamma ray burst. Those living on such a planet might even reasonably conclude that advanced life on a planet within a galaxy, like our own, was very unlikely.