Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

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rstevenson
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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by rstevenson » Mon Jun 14, 2010 2:27 pm

Ann wrote:... Or it could be that life is finicky, that it won't form easily, and that it certainly won't evolve into complex life forms easily. It could be that our star, untypical and unusual as it is, was one of the few in our galaxy which was good enough for life.
I'd vote for that sort of conclusion, though we have too little data to say for sure one way or the other. For example, it may be that life begins and evolves faster on a panet near our type of star than it does around those multitudinous cool red stars, and that we're therefore early inhabitants of our galaxy. Or a more common form of life may have evolved and died out millions of times already around those common stars, and we're late to the party. No way to know -- yet. And maybe not ever, unless we can figure a way around the light "barrier."

As we learn more about our sun and others, it becomes clear that the Drake Equation needs some refinement in its terms to account for different kinds of stellar environments.

Which might be a good thread here. Post your Drake Equation solutions, and the reasoning behind them. Shall I?

Rob

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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by Chris Peterson » Mon Jun 14, 2010 2:34 pm

rstevenson wrote:As we learn more about our sun and others, it becomes clear that the Drake Equation needs some refinement in its terms to account for different kinds of stellar environments.
I don't think so. The Drake Equation is already chock full of huge unknowns. What is the purpose of extending the precision of one term out a few decimal places when the other multiplicative terms are only estimated to orders of magnitude?

I think there is probably life all over, around all sorts of stars. Intelligence is probably not all that unusual. But species don't last very long, and civilizations probably much less than that. Given the immense cost and difficulty involved in populating a galaxy, I find it unsurprising that we see nobody else- even if there are millions of civilizations active at any time in a galaxy.
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Post by Beta » Mon Jun 14, 2010 4:16 pm

beyond wrote:[Bumblebees'] wing size does not give them enough lift to fly (especially the really big ones), but they do not know that and fly around anyway.
This is a myth. Even if it were true that bumblebees could not fly according to our theories of aerodynamics, that would simply mean that our theories were wrong (though maybe still good enough for designing machines that work). The real story is obscure, but it seems that in the early 20th century, European scientists noticed that according to the rules they had worked out for flight with rigid wings that don't oscillate very far, bumblebees should not be able to fly; they concluded that there is something about the flexibility and flapping of the bumblebee's wings that makes a big difference, and that they did not know everything about aerodynamics. This pretty story somehow became an an anti-science meme, like the we-can't-really-know-anything interpretations of relativity and quantum mechanics, with all the associated imagery of lab-coated scientists standing in a meadow waving their dissertations and insisting that those bumblebees can't really be flying around. The fact that we now know more about insect flight than we did in 1920 isn't mentioned, because it doesn't improve the story.

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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by rstevenson » Mon Jun 14, 2010 9:59 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
rstevenson wrote:As we learn more about our sun and others, it becomes clear that the Drake Equation needs some refinement in its terms to account for different kinds of stellar environments.
I don't think so. The Drake Equation is already chock full of huge unknowns. What is the purpose of extending the precision of one term out a few decimal places when the other multiplicative terms are only estimated to orders of magnitude?
I see your point. I was thinking of adding in a factor for type of sun. But of course we have only one data point for all of the factors, so I don't suppose one more will help.
Chris Peterson wrote:I think there is probably life all over, around all sorts of stars. Intelligence is probably not all that unusual.
I agree there is likely life all over. I'm not too sure about how much of that life evolved to intelligence coincident in time with our own. I think that "type of sun" factor may help with estimating that -- if only we knew enough to enter a figure for it. :?
Chris Peterson wrote:But species don't last very long, and civilizations probably much less than that. ...
Now there my estimate would be quite different from yours. True, species "in the wild" come and go, but I think an intelligent species would last almost forever if it possibly could arrange to do so -- always assuming they get beyond the smart enough to kill themselves, but not smart enough not to stage. Aye, there's the rub.

Rob

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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by Ann » Tue Jun 15, 2010 2:41 am

And that's what we are reduced to when it comes to pondering the question of extraterrestrial life - believing, thinking, guessing.

Proving the existence of extraterrestrial life might well be hard, if that life doesn't look like we expect life to look, and if it exists in places where we have a hard time finding it, such as underground.

But as hard as it might be to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, that's nothing compared with how hard - no, make that how utterly impossible - it is going to be to prove the non-existence of such life.

Bear with me for a moment and consider the possibility that we are alone. (You may conclude that if we are alone, then that is because we were created by a God and this God chose not to create life elsewhere. But you may just as well conclude that if we are alone, then that is because life is really so improbable that it took an entire universe to come up with life on just one planet.)

Okay. So play this mind-game with me and accept, for the moment, the idea that we are alone. How do we go about proving that? How do we ever prove that there is nobody else out there? The way I see it, we would literally have to search every nook and cranny of every terrestrial planet out there, plus the innards of all said planets, plus, I'm sure, a few places that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial planets such as comets and perhaps the atmospheres of many gas giants, before we could know that there is no life there. And let's not forget that we would have to travel in time, too, and conduct our search again and carefully examine all the possible cosmic habitats of life at every possible time period.

So are we ever going to prove the non-existence of extraterrestrial life, if we are indeed alone?

Of course we aren't. I thought you'd see my point.

With me being so negative, do I believe that we are alone?

Well, let me put it like this - if a person strongly believes that we are alone in the universe, then that person has a religious belief in that concept, because a conviction should be termed a religious belief if it is forever beyond the reach of our knowledge. And I'm not particularly religious.

Then again, a person who believes that the universe is teeming with life is also a bit religious in his or her belief, as long as we have no proof whatsoever to back the concept up. But the person who believes in life elsewhere at least has a chance to be vindicated by science in the future.

Somebody put it like this: We are either alone or we aren't. Either way, it's a staggering thought.

I like that.

Ann
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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by bystander » Tue Jun 15, 2010 7:46 am

How to find a habitable exoplanet: Don't look for one
Scientific American | Guest Blog | 14 June 2010
Caleb Scharf wrote:
Most planetary scientists will tell you that the objects they study are more complex and harder to categorize than almost anything else out there in the universe. That assertion is surprising and interesting, and it's a point that is gradually sinking in for astronomers. Much of the past 400 years of telescopic exploration has been about stellar taxonomy, pinning objects into their respective display cases. Despite the glorious wealth of 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the physics underlying their fundamental properties is remarkably uniform, and most can be readily described with only a few parameters – mass, age, elemental abundance. Individuals may be having particularly bad millennia, covered in spots, twisting their magnetic fields into knots, and throwing off flares, but their overall place in the cosmic zoo can be well defined.

Not true for planets, especially the smaller ones that just might be suitable for harboring life in a recognizable form. Mass, age and composition are just the start of a lengthy list of important characteristics. How far does it orbit from its parent star? What type of star does it orbit? Is the orbit elliptical? Does the planet have an atmosphere, and if so what is the composition? Is there an axial tilt? Are there other planets in the system, exerting their gravitational might and forcing the orbit to shift over time? Are there gravitational tides at work, flexing and molding the planet? Is there volcanism or tectonic activity? How is the interior of a world layered? Is there a global magnetic field, cocooning the world? How did the planet assemble, does it have surface water? Did the planet get washed by rich organic chemistry in its youth? Does it have moons, and if so, what are the conditions on those? How often are they pelted by asteroids and comets?

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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by The Code » Wed Jun 16, 2010 12:34 am

Ann wrote:And that's what we are reduced to when it comes to pondering the question of extraterrestrial life - believing, thinking, guessing.

Proving the existence of extraterrestrial life might well be hard, if that life doesn't look like we expect life to look, and if it exists in places where we have a hard time finding it, such as underground.

But as hard as it might be to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, that's nothing compared with how hard - no, make that how utterly impossible - it is going to be to prove the non-existence of such life.

Bear with me for a moment and consider the possibility that we are alone. (You may conclude that if we are alone, then that is because we were created by a God and this God chose not to create life elsewhere. But you may just as well conclude that if we are alone, then that is because life is really so improbable that it took an entire universe to come up with life on just one planet.)

Okay. So play this mind-game with me and accept, for the moment, the idea that we are alone. How do we go about proving that? How do we ever prove that there is nobody else out there? The way I see it, we would literally have to search every nook and cranny of every terrestrial planet out there, plus the innards of all said planets, plus, I'm sure, a few places that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial planets such as comets and perhaps the atmospheres of many gas giants, before we could know that there is no life there. And let's not forget that we would have to travel in time, too, and conduct our search again and carefully examine all the possible cosmic habitats of life at every possible time period.

So are we ever going to prove the non-existence of extraterrestrial life, if we are indeed alone?

Of course we aren't. I thought you'd see my point.

With me being so negative, do I believe that we are alone?

Well, let me put it like this - if a person strongly believes that we are alone in the universe, then that person has a religious belief in that concept, because a conviction should be termed a religious belief if it is forever beyond the reach of our knowledge. And I'm not particularly religious.

Then again, a person who believes that the universe is teeming with life is also a bit religious in his or her belief, as long as we have no proof whatsoever to back the concept up. But the person who believes in life elsewhere at least has a chance to be vindicated by science in the future.

Somebody put it like this: We are either alone or we aren't. Either way, it's a staggering thought.

I like that.

Ann
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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by The Code » Tue Jun 22, 2010 9:19 pm

Is the sun getting bigger right now?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37705466/ns ... nce-space/

Who knows?

tc
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Re: Is the sun getting bigger, Right Now!

Post by bystander » Tue Jun 22, 2010 9:46 pm

The Code wrote:Is the sun getting bigger right now?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37705466/ns ... nce-space/

Who knows?
What does that have to do with the size of the Sun???

That post deals with the relative inactivity of the Sun (copied from Space.com article). That topic is covered here and here. You posted the same article here. I think once, in an appropriate location, is enough. Don't you?

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