[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-11-08 04:46, Andrew Mckee wrote:
> For instance, if (yes, big IF I know) the EU crowd are right and 
> electric plasma fusion of the elements is occurring in the suns 
> photosphere, and thanks to sunspots and solar flares, is being 
> regularly flung outwards into electrically confined plasma streams 
> where they can mix and mingle and fuse into simple organic molecules, 
> before being deposited onto the surfaces of earth like planets by the 
> cubic boatload.
>
> Then surely that would be a major game changer to the balance of 
> probabilities of life self assembling from a thick, frequently 
> mutating bio-molecular soup.

Yes, but more importantly, it would *completely* change the behavior of 
stellar models. This is an area where a *huge* amount of theoretical and 
empirical work has been done, producing models that agree with 
observation very well (check any intro astrophysics book), yet would 
behave very differently if you add fusion in the photosphere.

Astrophysics is full of testable predictions. And anything that affects 
metallicity and temperature of star photospheres is very easy to check.

Of course, maybe a century of astrophysicists have all barked up the 
wrong tree. But in that case they managed to build a self-consistent 
false family of models that accurately reproduce most features of the 
H-Z diagram and empirical data from nearly every star. This is so 
non-trivial that I hold it to be much less likely than alternate 
theories require extraordinary proof (like running a star code with the 
new assumptions and reconstructing the empirical data).

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University