Is the Sun Unusual?
Video Statistics and Information
Channel: undefined
Views: 203,317
Rating: 4.8846197 out of 5
Keywords: is the sun rare, rare sun, rare sun hypothesis, rare earth hypothesis, is the sun special, is the solar system special, copernican principle, principle of mediocrity, astrobiology, life in the universe, astronomy, astrophysics, cool worlds lab, professor kipping, david kipping
Id: TAQKJ41eDTs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)
Published: Wed Jun 17 2020
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I think that's most likely with regards to the Fermi Paradox is a quite boring answer.
Rare sun, rare earth, rare life(at least multi cellular) combined with rare intelligence. Chuck in a few potential filters that could be behind us or in front of us and boom. Lonely universe.
I think we are still living in a fairly young era of the universe. Earth is roughly 4-4.5 billion years, life has existed for roughly 3.7 billion years and for the majority of the time it was single cellular.
So I think it's quite possible that despite the huge number of candidates out there if you add all the facts up it's just too early.
Other factors that might throw a wrench in making at least the more advanced forms of intelligence rare are things like energy abundance. What if coal and oil was unavailable to us or much much harder to get? Maybe we would eventually have progressed technologically but perhaps at a greatly reduced speed. What if certain metals had been unavailable or harder to get?
Perhaps in the end we aren't very special but are in one of those rare, rare, places that enough factors has come together to allow us to develop fairly early?
The statistically unusual characteristics of the sun, including having a relatively stable luminosity and low variability over geologic time spans, low output of solar flares, an uncommon size considering most stars are red dwarfs, being a single star system, all add up to the sun being a statistical outlier, which may have implications for the fermi paradox. If technological civilisation requires a star as atypical as ours, it might partially explain why the odds for technological civilisations are so low that we only have a sample of 1 so far.
I didn’t find his arguments that persuasive. Even if you take everything into account, 0.5% of stars would still be similar to the sun.
I would like to watch it but damn that guy's voice and way he talks is annoying.
"that our home star... ... might be special... ..."
I don't think it deserves attention of a futurology channel. It is straightforward scientific question that can be answered already or very soon.
Is is unusual in that most stars are red dwarves.