On the anomalous Sun

The Sun’s anomalous. The Moon’s anomalous. The Earth’s anomalous. Why, the solar system as a whole is anomalous.
The more we know,

@jety

This makes for wonderment for people of faith.

It is not scientific evidence of metaphysical truths.

Doesn’t help to disprove it either.

How so? How anolamous is it? Out of all the G-type main sequence stars in the universe, what proportion have similar rotational velocities?

There was a study done on US census returns a few years ago that was aimed at discovering the ‘average American’. It transpired that there wasn’t one - there wasn’t a single census respondee who was in the median or commonest band for everything on the census. Every single US person is non-average in at least one respect.

If you measure enough properties, the chances of an entity being standard on every single one dwindles so rapidly that the improbability of finding an ‘average’ entity quickly exceeds the population size. Everything is anomalous in some fashion.

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Oh, and anthropic principle

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It’s a life-giving anomaly.

It’s amazing that life arose where it was possible for life to arise.

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Yeah I’d be really impressed if we found life where it shouldn’t be possible. Cells made of complex organic molecules persisting at ten thousand degrees Kelvin would make me sit up and take notice.

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I don’t mean to dismiss the factors that allow life to arise or thrive. Exobiologists continue to ponder these things. And it’s interesting.

Still, when we talk about things as ‘anomalous’ we have to make clear what we’re describing. Typically, we mean it in the sense that something is ‘peculiar’, ‘unexpected’ or ‘distinctly different’. Things that occur with low probabilities may or may not actually be ‘anomalous’. Looking into parameters like rotation, it seems our sun falls within the continuum of measurements made of other stars. So, I wouldn’t consider the sun ‘anomalous’: It’s not ‘average’ but it’s also not ‘peculiar’ or improbably rare given the number of stars in the galaxy or the universe.

We live on a planet that has the conditions necessary for life to evolve.

If we lived on a planet that didn’t, that’d be excellent evidence of design.

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Yes, the sun is anomalous and the moon is anomalous.

It seems to me that we live in a world where everything is anomalous. And if we found something that was not anomalous, that would be truly anomalous.

In other shocking news, tropical plants were found growing in the tropics which happens to have just the right conditions for tropical plants.

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That’s a good way of putting the logical issue at the heart of “Fine Tuning”.

If the universe was a huge apple pie with ripples … and the ripples prevented us from seeing any other life form on the apple pie - - those living in the middle of the Apple Pie wouldn’t have much to talk about.

But for all those life forms living on the very edge of the apple pie…and perfectly evolved for their location on the edge. And guess what?

They can’t stop talking about how close to oblivion they exist… they can only conclude that they live on a very fine-tuned edge of an inhospitable Apple Pie!

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Some of those living on the apple pie claim that apple pies occur naturally, while others think apple pies can only be the result of intelligent design.

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and @Argon:

Regarding the mud puddle argument you both seem to like.

We’re not talking about the supposed fine-tuning of the universe, or the origin of the universe. The question being considered here is the attributes of the sun that make it conducive to life’s existence on Earth. It should not come as a surprise to find life having persisted in a solar system where it could.

That’s not supposed to constitute an explanation for why the solar system has those attributes. It is merely intended to show it would be rather nonsensical to act surprised to find that your surroundings have allowed your continued survival. In so far as you exist, that should be a given. To think of all the things that could have been different and would have prevented your existence. Well obviously those didn’t occur or you wouldn’t be here.

You may still ask why those conditions obtained in the first place, and to that question the puddle-analogy does not apply.

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It appears that the author of that article failed to understand the point of the analogy. The water conforms to the hole in the ground. In the same way, life conforms to the place where it emerges. It’s a description of cause and effect. So it isn’t that stunning to find well adapted life on a planet that is capable of harboring life in the same way it is not that stunning to find the shape of the puddle exactly matching the shape of the hole in the ground.

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This is ‘begging the question’ or ‘missing the point’. Working with this analogy, the essential question to be addressed is whether we’re living on an apple pie. Only after that can be established does the rest follow.

Indeed, why would one expect a finely-tuned universe to require additional, post-origin tweaking to ensure at least of few of the trillions (?) of solar systems have conditions suitable for life? That kinda undercuts the ‘fine tuning’ arguments.

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