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While fun to think about big numbers at these scales this fact seems entirely arbitrary. You can fit a million Earths into our singular sun. 200 billion stars i
by izzydata 2y ago
While fun to think about big numbers at these scales this fact seems entirely arbitrary. You can fit a million Earths into our singular sun. 200 billion stars is still quite a bit more impressive than 3 trillion trees.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoStars are big but not complex or necessarily unique. A single tree had more complexity in it than every star.
- imoverclocked 2y agoReference? I ask because we barely understand our own star, the Sun. We know it has solar minima/maxima and we still track sunspots as a primary means of qualifying how we think it will affect us. We are still sending probes to get closer looks at the surface which is extremely dynamic.
- andsoitis 2y agoIn terms of biological and ecological complexity, a tree is vastly more complex, as it exhibits life processes, growth, interaction with other organisms, and adaptability. In terms of physical processes and energy production, the sun is immensely complex in its own right, but it doesn't exhibit the same kind of dynamic, adaptive behavior that we associate with life.
- TheRealNGenius 2y ago[dead]
- CMCDragonkai 2y agoA tree could be at a higher entropic level of reality than the sun. Just like we would consider a tiger to be more "interesting" than a tree.
- mr_mitm 2y agoAnother point of view: it took over ten billion years for the first tree to form in the universe. The first stars were present only after a couple hundred million years.
- saiya-jin 2y agoThere is no way to know this, universe can be chock full of trees of some form on certain type and position of the planet. Later than first stars for sure, but thats about it with our current knowledge
- FabHK 2y agoYou can have stars without trees, but you can’t have trees without stars.
- imoverclocked 2y agoIf we substitute something else in this argument, we can see that it’s trivially not true for arguing complexity: You can have stars without lead, but you can’t have lead without stars; Lead (the element) is produced by stars but is itself not more complex than a star.
- mr_mitm 2y agoOur current knowledge points to the first planets appearing around one billion years after the big bang (heavy elements need to be bred in stars in sufficient quantities first and be ejected in super novae), and evolution taking another billion years to produce eucaryotic life, then another three billion for plants to form. So while obviously we can't say for sure, I stand by my original statement when speaking in terms of orders of magnitudes. I think it's a sensible argument.
- sshine 2y ago> 200 billion stars is still quite a bit more impressive than 3 trillion trees. That assessment itself seems rather arbitrary, too. It is indeed fun to think about these things. Like how the number of fungal species on Earth keeps growing the better we get at counting them: conservative estimates of the past were at 500.000, and current estimates are at 2.2 to 3.8 million species: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/microbiolspec.funk-0052-2016 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/microbiolspec.funk-0052... Or that Norway's coastline is arbitrarily long depending on your ruler's precision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
- BurningFrog 2y agoThe number of species also depends a lot on what you count as a separate species.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoWhich is largely dependent on how many PhD students we mint.
- sshine 2y agoCertainly. There’s a story from an old Joe Rogan interview with Paul Stamets about one species that mycologists had got wrong because of the way they sampled it: another species was “chasing” it, and sampling had hit the chaser. Who knows, maybe some fungi chase themselves!
- BurningFrog 2y agoWhat does "chasing" mean here?
- sshine 2y agoI have no idea, I'm not a mycologist. But what I understood was that one fungus was trying to consume another. It's episode #1035 at around 1h53m: https://www.youtube.com/live/mPqWstVnRjQ?si=AgxlSe4pXB4Fe9lT&t=6822 https://www.youtube.com/live/mPqWstVnRjQ?si=AgxlSe4pXB4Fe9lT... https://podscribe.app/feeds/http-joeroganexpjoeroganlibsynprocom-rss/episodes/712d60d43eda458a666176421dc7a7c8 https://podscribe.app/feeds/http-joeroganexpjoeroganlibsynpr... It starts a discussion about how the FDA is incompetent to make rulings about cordyceps mushrooms because the thousands of peer-reviewed articles about them predate a more precise sampling method that uncovers that there are multiple species (or anamorph strands of the same species, I'm unsure).