What If We Lived in a Globular Cluster?

[Music] imagine if our night sky looked like this looks cool doesn't it well what's not cool is that you'd have to live your life with no electricity cars rockets jewelry or your cell phone this is what if and here's what would happen if we lived in a globular cluster take some cosmic dust and gas add billions and billions of planets and a whole lot of stars to the mix spice it all up with a handful of gravity to hold things together and you've got a galaxy shaken not stirred some of those ingredients would get clumped together the gases and dust would merge into stars and stars would get packed together into globular clusters some of these clusters could count up to a million stars stuffed into an area 3.2 light-years across to put that in perspective the closest star to our Sun is about 4.37 light-years away could a planet even exist where so many stars are so close together first of all the stars in a globular cluster aren't exactly like our good old Sun there are about 150 star clusters in our galaxy the Milky Way in most of them star formation stopped over 10 billion years ago it's like a very ancient stellar retirement home compared to those stars are four-and-a-half billion year old son is still a teenager if we had evolved on an earth-like planet in one of those old globular clusters we'd be a very ancient and much more advanced civilization than we are now the problem is we might not have had a chance to evolve there in the first place not only are the stars in globular clusters very old they don't contain as many metals as our Sun does planets are born from the leftovers of star formations inside a globular cluster there might not be enough building materials for a rocky planet like Earth to be formed even our Sun might have had trouble forming in those conditions but if it did it would most likely have a stellar partner binary star systems aren't unusual in the universe but they are less likely to host habitable planets that we could live on another problem is that globular clusters are very very dense chances would be high that an alien star would collide with our Sun one day but let's imagine that we were very lucky that our Sun formed inside a globular cluster and so did our planet imagine that the conditions on that earth were somewhat habitable for us to evolve in and that we did but it wouldn't be the same us we'd have to get by without most of the metals available to us here how would we create our first tools build our homes or invent our tack we might be stuck in the Stone Age forever but at least we'd have an incredible view of thousands of very bright stars shining down on our planet on the other hand if we figured out how to make rockets out of rocks the extremely short distances between the stars would let us colonize other star systems fairly easily space travel would be our main gig we'd settle on other planets and spread our human civilization all over the globular cluster that we lived in that is if there were other planets to travel to scientists don't know for sure how many planets could form in these clusters and they don't know if life is actually possible inside the stellar swarm but they are looking for signs of intelligent life out there I for one hope they find an ancient alien civilization inhabiting one of the oldest star systems in our galaxy but that's a story for another what if [Music]

Channel: What If

Views: 489,535

Rating: 4.8970447 out of 5

Keywords: what if, what happens if, scifi, science documentary, what if scenario, biggest questions in science, globular clusters, what is globular cluster, is the earth in a globular cluster, globular clusters astronomy, space, what is a galaxy, galaxies and clusters, star clusters, milky way galaxy, how are globular clusters formed, how are galaxies formed, interstellar documentary, stars in space, science fiction documentary, orion nebula, star dust

Id: MkhoKeJlqwA

Length: 4min 21sec (261 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019