Thanks for this nice blog. I have a few comments / questions related to sentences I didn’t find clear in your text. I hope you will take some time to clarify them.
All the stars we see today are living stars.
In fact, this is not entirely true. The reason is that light takes some time to reach us. Therefore, if the star lies quite away in the universe, then it is very possible that it has died by the time we see its light.
Without the black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, the Earth would not be in a favorable environment for life. So it can be said that supernova explosion is very necessary for life.
What do you mean by the above sentence? I do not think that life has anything to do with the back hole lying in the centre of our galaxy. In fact, I am puzzled because I am quite certain that this black hole has no impact on the fact life developed on Earth.
Cheers!
Interestingly, he's not talking about life in that text you quoted. He talks about life later though :)
On the other hand, I have heard other people argue that life on earth depends on that black hole. From technicalities they appeal to chaos theory, which in the end tells us that the most sensible opinion is to say "we don't know if the black hole had or has anything to do with life on earth." We do not have enough data on black holes killing life or favoring it in a complex or simple system.
However, we do know that the universe is hostile to life as we know it everywhere. The enormous effects of a black hole stalking us so close could very likely be lethal to us and our microbial ancestors. We also know that at the time of the dinosaurs and cyanobacteria, the solar system was located in a very different region of the milky way, following a fortunate trajectory that has avoided some disastrous cosmic events.
I think even putting the latter in terms of set complements makes sense: our sun is in the set of stars that are not close to the black hole.
This also reminds me of the fine tuning argument that creationists like to use, but in more skeptical and scientific terms I would prefer to talk about the proposed modifications to the Drake equation, since it still makes very few assumptions, but of course, its original purpose was not to provide a serious framework for this issue of the emergence of life.
I came across this while writing the distilled.
I updated the text. I indeed copy-pasted the wrong sentence.
Whereas I agree with the above statement, it sounds more logical to me to say that local environment plays a more important role than that of the back hole. That's the only thing I wanted to raise. Of course, we don't know and everything is possible.
As written later in your comment, we at the same time lie quite far from the black hole. By the time we get close to it, life will be done around here because of the Sun.
Science talks about the death of stars. A star's life span is related to its fuel. That is, I have called those stars that have not yet run out of fuel as living stars.
At the center of our galaxy lies a black hole. Our solar system is moving in that direction.Without the black hole at the center of our galaxy, would it be good for life if we were isolated in the universe? I think that just as our solar system created the perfect environment for life on Earth. I also think that this galaxy is a system that sustains our solar system. We cannot deny that this is a part of the Milky Way Galaxy.
But anyway it was my thought. Mistakes are normal. Thanks for your suggestion. Very good observation
Mmmh I didn't you didn't get fully what I wrote. Please let me clarify a bit and provide more details, so that my points will be easier to understand. If not, feel free to come back to me.
This is correct. However, this is not at all my point. Let me clarify.
The moment at which a star emits its light and the moment at which we see this light on Earth may be two very different moments. Due to the finiteness of the speed of light, light takes some time to get to us. For stars lying at millions of light-years from us, millions of years have passed between light emission and observation. During this amount of time, it is not unlikely the star has died. Therefore, all the stars that we see are definitely not all living stars.
What you answered is different from what is written in your blog. The fact that life was possible on Earth is due to a lot of different causes (I am not even sure we know them all), the configuration of the planet within the solar system and the properties of the Sun being two of them.
However, the fact that our solar system moves towards the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way does not imply anything. We have the counterexample of all other planets of the solar system, that are similarly affected by this black hole whereas there is no life on them.
Of course he solar system is part of the Milky Way. However, how does it impact the fact that life appeared on our planet. Life appeared mostly due to local conditions than global ones at the galactic level. Otherwise, we should be able to observe life everywhere, shouldn't we?
Yes, I understand ,Your powers of observation are great. I have benefited from discussing science with you. Hope to see you in the next posts. Hope to be able to gain more knowledge from you. This is stemsocial. Community for discussing science
Thanks :)