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The Surprising History of Claims for Life on the Sun (2011)
- causi 3y agoThe sun is so large I bet all kinds of unlikely phenomena are possible at small scales. If there was life on the sun, would be know it or recognize it?
- escapecharacter 3y agoUsing a looser definition of the solar boundary, we are all “in” the sun’s atmosphere, the density of which is ~3-10 particles per cm*3 near Earth.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoIt's easy to notice carbon/water life because we are it, but most of our complexity exist within a rather narrow energy band (molecular electron orbitals with energy greater than a C-O and less than a C-H), so I think you're right to doubt that we'd recognize if there were a similarly narrow window into surprising complexity in the nuclear reactions that take place within the sun. I expect there's quite a lot of "life" that we're overlooking, and that we're going to feel quite silly when we have whatever encounter causes us to broaden our definitions to include the rest of it. Although to be pedantic, most definitions of life require that it be made of cells, and I doubt there are anything like cells in the sun.
- jnxx 3y ago> most definitions of life require that it be made of cells Is there a deeper reason for that?
- lemaitre 3y agoMost definitions of life are very arbitrary. When it comes to astrobiology, we mostly look for things that look like us because if we didn't, the search space would be incomprehensibly large and frankly there's not a lot we could say.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoMy guess is that it had to do with avoiding a definition under which things like fire were alive. I'd rather exclude fire on the basis that it's "reproduction" involves nothing like heritability.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoShould it? Doesn't it inherit 'fireness'? I do know what you're saying but it's so easy to argue the other way too
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoYeah definitions are tricky. If you saw a house consumed with fire, you might look at the circumstances and conclude that it was likely the offspring of the fire that consumed the house across the street, but there wouldn't be anything about the fire's phenotype that would help you come to that conclusion. If the flames carried the characteristic shape of their parents fire, and they could be distinguished as not the offspring of some other fire by their features alone, then I'd be arguing that fire is alive. I feel like I'm at risk of classifying certain periodic crystals as alive here, but they wouldn't meet the thermodynamic requirements that I have in mind (which fire does meet).
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoNot to be a dick (oh, go on then!): > but there wouldn't be anything about the fire's phenotype that would help you come to that conclusion but... but... cloning! But yes, we could do this all day and still get nowhere. We, collectively, are missing something but I don't know what.
- jschrf 3y agoComplexity theory comes to mind. Self-similar encapsulates that combine to create emergent behaviors.
- nachomg 3y agoYou made me remember how I was ridiculed by my teacher by asking if there was a possibility that life could be based on other thing than carbon. Granted, as I grew older and learnt a little bit more about the chemistry of carbon I realized that it had almost magic properties for life, but I wondered for long time why he reacted that way.
- cmccart 3y agoRidiculing genuine curiosity is a terrible behavior from teachers... why stifle inquisitive minds? Anyway, you may already be familiar with these proposed biochemistries, but there has been a lot of speculation on this exact question over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
- booleandilemma 3y agoI think it's simply that the teacher feels insecure.
- brabel 3y agoYou probably triggered some memory. Perhaps, a student who insisted they knew more than the teacher and pushed some ignorant argument too far... so when you suggested the idea, and perhaps tried to push a bit more consideration, the teacher found himself re-living that bad experience and treated you like you were the other student, even if you yourself didn't push the matter beyond an acceptable level. It happens to the best of us.
- 0x00_NULL 3y agoSilicon has almost the exact same properties as carbon. At high temperatures, carbon chains can’t form, but silicon chains can. In a high-temperature or high-pressure range, silicon might for a basis for life, analogous to carbon for us. So, not only was that question not stupid, it was profound. Look at silicon on the periodic table. All of the things that make carbon great, basically silicon has almost exactly, except it needs a high temperature for most of those properties to be expressible. That teacher didn’t know what he was talking about. Ridiculing a student for questions is such detestable behavior. The silliest questions can end up being the most insightful. I really despise teachers like that. Here is a paper all about how your question was actually wonderful. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7345352/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7345352/
- gus_massa 3y ago> most definitions of life require that it be made of cells Does this animal has cells? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophorea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophorea I feel like answering yes and calling it "unicelular" is cheating, but it's clear that it evolved from animals with cells and it has only "one".
- gamepsys 3y ago> A coenocyte (/ˈsiːnəˌsaɪt/) is a multinucleate cell which can result from multiple nuclear divisions without their accompanying cytokinesis. Seems like a cell to me? How is it clear that it evolved from animals? It seems like clear protist to me.
- gus_massa 3y ago> Seems like a cell to me? It's a cell, but the (informal) idea is that a big living thing is made of a lot of small cells. If there is a catastrofic extintion and only these things survive, would and alien biologist clasify them as a huge cell or as a blob? > How is it clear that it evolved from animals? It seems like clear protist to me. My bad. You are right. I probaly mean from a normal living thing with small cells with only one nuclei. --- Side note: I'm not sure it's related, but as a curiosity, our muscles have cells with multiple nuclei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_cell > Skeletal muscle fibers are made when myoblasts fuse together; muscle fibers therefore are cells with multiple nuclei, known as myonuclei, with each cell nucleus originating from a single myoblast. The fusion of myoblasts is specific to skeletal muscle, and not cardiac muscle or smooth muscle.
- jnxx 3y agoMaybe it would have a heartbeat period of 11 years?
- badcppdev 3y agoIn the polar regions of the Sun where the surface temperatures might be lower.... /jk On a serious note scientists have long been able to measure that the sun has a large amount of energy available to any possible inhabitants. Until we understood enough physics around plasmas and the composition of stars it makes perfect sense to hypothesise the existence of creatures/life that would be able to utilise that energy for their own version of high temperature life. To be clear, I think that the extreme conditions in every part of the Sun preclude any possibility of life or life like processes.
- pfdietz 3y agoOr on the Sun's night side!
- arrowsmith 3y ago"What if we go in da winter, when da Sun is cold?" - Ali G
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- kragen 3y ago[flagged]
- Retric 3y agoA lack of understanding of plasma dynamics isn't preventing construction of a useful fusion reactor. Other energy sources being cheap and construction costs being high are much larger limitations. We could have built a scaled up steady state tokamak using pure D-D fusion all the way back in the 1990's. We didn't because coal, fission, etc where plentiful/cheap and nobody was going to waste a trillion dollars on such technological dead end. The current technical challenges are all about bring the costs down. Designing and using a breeding blanket is far more complected than a steel wall, but D-T allows for a vastly smaller and therefore hopefully much cheaper device.
- kragen 3y agotokamak researchers generally do not agree with you the humans only achieved breakeven in 02022, and not in a tokamak, but in an inertial confinement experiment, which is to say, a tiny bomb. thinking you need a trillion dollars is a symptom of not knowing how to do it; the trillion dollars are to spend on experiments
- Retric 3y agoActually that trillion dollar number was from a Tokamak researcher. Though I am not sure how serious they where being when using it. With Tokamak's Q isn't a constant for a general design it's a result of scaling laws and a specific size thus ITER was chosen at Q >= 10 but they could have picked bigger or smaller target. EX: https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/fusionportal/Shared%20Documents/FEC%202016/fec2016-preprints/preprint0759.pdf https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/fusionportal/Shared%20Documen... In 1997 JET hit an equivalent Q of 0.67 using a 3m by 1.25m device and D-T. You can look at costs and scaling factors along with the output of DD vs DT fusion. I took a trillion dollar budget just mean ~10,000x the cost of JET which seems to line up reasonably well. Though making such a large jump in scale would have it's own challenges.
- Verdex 3y agoThere's a short story that has an interesting take on this. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-lem/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
- meindnoch 3y agoI can imagine self-replicating structures of plasma.
- jnxx 3y agoHow we would call such depends how you define and understand life. If one defines it very widely as a dynamic dissipative process in an open thermodynamic system which organizes matter and energy, reacts to its surroundings, can reproduce itself, may have some symbolic representation of its surroundings, and possibly even care for its reproductions, intelligent life on a star is entirely possible, even if it would be very, very different from us. If you on the other hand, define it as a set of dissipative structures which are based on organic carbon chemistry and which is able to exist somewhere between -30 and 40 degrees centigrade, replicates itself, use Deoxyribonucleic acid to store generational information, nourish their young by mammary glands, and walk on two legs, we are probably pretty alone in the universe. Another things to think about, all life forms on our planet are relatives in the sense that we have common ancestors and shared DNA, even such "alien" creatures like tarantulas or centipedes. Given that, I am not entirely sure that it would be pleasant for us to meet technologically superior aliens. We would have to pray that they have much more empathy with other living things than we primates ourselves can usually muster.
- more_corn 3y agoThe former definition seems to me necessary and sufficient.
- nathan_compton 3y ago"If you on the other hand, define it as a set of dissipative structures which are based on organic carbon chemistry and which is able to exist somewhere between -30 and 40 degrees centigrade, replicates itself, use Deoxyribonucleic acid to store generational information, nourish their young by mammary glands, and walk on two legs, we are probably pretty alone in the universe." No one would define life this way.
- gamepsys 3y ago
- ganzuul 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver https://www.mpg.de/20074327/extraterrestrial-intelligence-quantum-computing-with-black-holes https://www.mpg.de/20074327/extraterrestrial-intelligence-qu... The idea didn't die, it grew to an unrecognizable size.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoAlso, the Xeelee sequence by Stephen Baxter.
- mrec 3y agoIt's yonks since I read it, but IIRC Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937) played with (alongside everything else) the idea of stars as life-forms themselves. I'd strongly recommend it; it's very weird and obviously quite dated, but nothing else ever written even comes close for sheer ambition.
- n4r9 3y agoAt university I went to a talk called "Is the sun conscious?" By Rupert Sheldrake. He's also written up an article which mentions Starmaker: https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Conscious.pdf https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Consc... I'll save you the reading, as he doesn't provide any evidence for the proposition. He merely speculates on what it might mean for the sun to be conscious. Also he's way out there on the wacky scale. I sank a lot of time reading his works as an undergraduate, as they're couched in quite scientific terms and he claims to have conducted rigorous experiments. But the more you look into the experiments, the more methodological flaws you find, and eventually I decided it wasn't worth the effort.
- queuebert 3y agoRobert Forward wrote a series of sci-fi novels about life on the surface of a neutron star. The first was called Dragon's Egg [1] and is a decent, if tropey, read. Some of the same issues are addressed in his books, of course making a ton of assumptions about the properties of neutron star matter (we still don't know the equation of state for neutron stars). The idea is very simply that combining abundant energy with something capable of holding structure in such an environment could in theory produce a persistent store of information. A leap, sure, but a fun one. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
- ThemboMcBembo 3y agoI've actually been reading this over the last two days, and it's a fascinating read.
- ghaff 3y agoThere was also a sequel called Starquake which I remember as being less interesting. An ST:TNG episode also very much riffed off of Dragon's Egg.
- praptak 3y agoStanisław Lem wrote a story about a trio of scientists who recreate Sun's environment in a lab and discover it supports life & evolution which goes zero to sun-worm in the time it takes for the experiment to blow up, implying existence of lifeforms inside the Sun so advanced that they just don't bother to communicate with humans.
- Intralexical 3y ago> The idea is very simply that combining abundant energy with something capable of holding structure in such an environment could in theory produce a persistent store of information. A leap, sure, but a fun one. Hardly? We know that structures on the sun are capable of being (somewhat) persistent, and not only that, but even doing something vaguely resembling computation. Solar magnetic fieldlines are long-lived, producing visible sunspots that not only last for potentially several months, but show variations in frequency over a largely stable 11-year clock/cycle (during which the entire solar magnetic field flips/behaves as a binary oscillator). Magnetohydrodynamics is famously complex and capable of metastable configurations, and we don't know exactly what happens under the photosphere, but I don't think anybody could really argue that there isn't enough physical space and raw energy to swallow up every personal and animal on Earth. Really, for all we know, I think the sun itself might be alive/sentient. Or maybe it contains not physically embodied life, but isolated engrams and memes styled after Boltzmann brains, something analogous to crystal structures (which self-proliferate/grow) but with more complexity. The question is whether there's any way to decode/decrypt the information that definitely is there— complex heterogeneous distributions over time in field strength, temperatures, convection patterns, etc.— into any form that isn't just repetition plus random noise. I guess the issue is that you don't really know why you're conscious. If you had never seen a brain before, you would just think it was a useless blob of chaotically arranged fat. And even if you did know why you're conscious, you still wouldn't be able to say that that's the only way your specific form of consciousness can arise, nor that there aren't any other completely alien but equally conscious types of minds. Hell, homomorphic encryption means that it can be mathematically impossible to know whether any given complex system is just random noise, or contains someone's memories, experiences, desires, a soul. So given any system of adequate complexity, without knowing enough about it to put definite constraints on what it can do, I don't see how you could say for sure that it isn't "alive"/sentient. When I hit my early teens, the example I thought of was n-body gravitational perturbations in something like the asteroid belt, and something like crystal grain structures in regular solid matter. …Sucks for the lack of opposable thumbs, I guess, if it is alive. The information which may or may not be encoded in the sun may have unknown complexity and meaning, but I feel much more confident in saying that the amount of precision carried out by the solar wind and solar radiation will never allow it to shape and navigate the world around it like we can ours.
- m3kw9 3y agoHeat is bad for life because it makes atoms vibrate too fast, a lot of chaos, but not infinite chaos. Maybe there is a chance?
- jl6 3y agoThe sun would be a good hiding place for planet 9: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007APS..4CF.E1013P/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007APS..4CF.E1013P/abstra... Life deep within a sun-engulfed planet could perhaps survive for a while.
- creatonez 3y agoThe future sun, yes. The current sun is far, far too dense, which would make it cataclysmic (dramatically more energy released than Shoemaker-Levy 9) for the Earth to be inside of the sun.
- an1sotropy 3y agoThe beautiful "Bygone Visions of Cosmic Neighbors"* touches (at 13:13) on Sir William Herschel belief in life on the sun. Fun times. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhfCietvDZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhfCietvDZo