The rare Sun hypothesis

Flyaway

ACCESS: USAP
Senior Member
Joined
21 January 2015
Messages
10,664
Reaction score
12,293
Great video from Cool Worlds pointing out that less than 3% of stars are G class stars, and of that 3% only 0.5% of them are as quiet as the Sun. He goes onto to say we should be able to prove or disprove this theory in the near future even though it is hard to study stars like the Sun.

 
The more common, stable and longer-lived K-type stars come up in speculation about "superhabitable" planets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhabitable_planet

My interpretation of the Rare Earth Hypothesis is that it is what I call the "Rice Pudding Fallacy." Rice pudding is clearly an indicator of a technological intelligence and it you found a bowl of the stuff still hot, you could be sure that some moderately competent albeit very boring cook was nearby. Thus, if you had a reliable rice pudding detector, you could find technological civilisations, proving that they exist. However if you don't find rice pudding or even discover that in certain environments it might be impossible (no rice plants), you should not conclude that technological civilisation is impossible. Brownlee and Ward make far too many unproven assumptions that mistake correlates with present earthly intelligence with necessities for all intelligence.
 
Last edited:

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom