[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

[Andrew Mckee]

On Fri, 08 Nov 2013 21:45:24 +1300, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se>
wrote:

> 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.

Yeah sorry, scratch photosphere, I might very well be getting the labels
wrong.

But if I got the gist of it correctly, it's not 'adding' fusion at the  
surface, more likely 'instead of' fusion at the sun's core.
And I should add, the fusion is merely a by-product, it's not what is  
actually powering the sun, their claim is that the sun is powered  
externally by vast electric plasma streams sitting/flowing around galaxies  
and the universe.

So yeah, 'completely change' is probably an understatement.

But hey, on the bright side, their arguments are claimed to be based  
entirely on the known laws of physics and states of matter, so in theory  
they are eminently testable.

Anyone up for designing and building a ceramic probe that could be shot  
into a sunspot?
The data returned could go on to settle a lot of arguments, possibly even  
upend the universe as we know it. :-)

> 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

Well that is somewhat like what the author is claiming, although I'd say  
he states it a bit more gently.
Scientists were and still are faced with the problem of not being able to  
put an instrument package on an interstellar probe and physically verify  
that the forces measured are in agreement with remote observation and the  
models that got developed.

> and empirical data from nearly every star.

Well thats one of the sticking points isn't it, if an astronomer or two  
can write a book cataloging images of stellar objects that the standard  
model indicates shouldn't physically exist, then that to me would be a  
sign that maybe the standard universe model isn't quite the done deal that  
many say it is.  YMMV.

> 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).

Not sure what a 'star code' is, but I'd note that some in the EU crowd  
have been running super computer simulations of star clusters (galaxies  
maybe?) running a plasma physics model, and the produced results that do  
indeed seem tally up closely with actual images of real stellar objects.

The book has glossy images of the results to look at, amongst the other  
pretty and somewhat puzzling astronomical images (possibly also on a  
website somewhere I presume).