[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

Andrew Mckee andymck35 at gmail.com
Sun Nov 10 03:54:33 UTC 2013


On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 10:11:12 +1300, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
wrote:


> That seems pretty unlikely, the suns photosphere is icy cold, about  
> 6000K,
> and as for the sun's corona the density is too low and the temperature is
> only about 2 million degrees Kelvin, far too low for significant fusion  
> to
> occur. Fusion is really hard to do, even the center of the sun is lousy  
> at it,

Ah, perhaps it would have been better if I'd just said somewhere near the
suns surface and left it at that, I could very well be mis-representing
where exactly the author wrote it was happening.

Although perhaps I should add that it's a bit complicated, there was
mention of plasma streams forming double layers which induce nearby
streams into forming tightly bound spirals, in the center of which
something called Z-pinching occurs, which I presume is where plasma
densities are increased and intense electric currents do their thing.

But it's really a subject matter someone with a big brain should be
looking at, I couldn't even pretend to know how plasma physics works in a
neon sign, let alone parrot intelligently on how they claim a star works.


> That's not the problem, the problem is that the gap between simple  
> organic
> molecules and the simplest one celled organism known is astronomical. And
> it is entirely possible that the word " astronomical" is far too weak a
> word to describe that gap, if so then you need to look no further to
> explain why the universe doesn't look like it's been engineered.

Well I could be wrong, but seems to me biology has only recently got its  
second wind, so along with the synthetic bio-tech industry maybe in a  
decade or two they will have made more than a few discoveries that reveal  
a lot about some of the nifty shortcuts nature used in the beginning to  
get the job done.

Well that, and maybe the critics are right and the current estimate of the  
age of the universe is off, or indeed a great big red herring in the first  
place.
Maybe it really is just that our lucky numbers came up ahead of anybody  
else in the observable universe.

A scary thought to be sure, but what are the alternative explanations we  
can live with?, at least till humans (or trans- or post-humans) start  
launching star-ships out into the universe and actively start looking for  
the answers.



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