What if there were some highly advanced sentient beings inside the Sun?
Answers
Answer:
It’s often the people who are least aware of the more amazing and true facts about the world who exercise their imaginations to come up with absurdly implausible ideas like this one.
Realistically, we know of two ways to achieve sentience or an approximation thereof: Brains and computers. What do these approaches have in common? They’re complex structures of many billions of components. Neurons for brains, transistors for computers. All those parts need to be in place and connected or sentience won’t happen.
You know what else has structures with lots of connected components? Living cells and proteins. Common examples you’ll find in most households are eggs. They’re not nearly complex enough for sentience, but let’s ignore that for now. If you crack an egg into a pan and heat it to, say, 200°C, those proteins denature, that is, they break apart into a disjoint parts that no longer work the way the proteins in egg whites or yolks normally work. This can be generalized: Energy is the enemy of structure. You can destroy pretty much anything if you push enough energy into it. That’s pretty much the operating principle of any of mankind’s many weapons.
Now look at the Sun: Suns are natural fusion reactors; Temperatures are between thousands and millions of degrees. That’s energy in such humongous amounts that anything breaks down. Most of the Sun is just a soup of dissociated nuclear particles. It’s the opposite of structure, the complete lack of connections. The Sun is what you’d build if you wanted to be completely sure of never seeing sentience, at least as we know it.
The Sun is a huge blob of what you could call broken matter, held together by gravity and its huge size. If you wanted to find sentience, the Sun is pretty much the last place anyone would expect to find it.
What if there were some highly advanced sentient beings inside the Sun?
It’s often the people who are least aware of the more amazing and true facts about the world who exercise their imaginations to come up with absurdly implausible ideas like this one.
Realistically, we know of two ways to achieve sentience or an approximation thereof: Brains and computers. What do these approaches have in common? They’re complex structures of many billions of components. Neurons for brains, transistors for computers. All those parts need to be in place and connected or sentience won’t happen.
You know what else has structures with lots of connected components? Living cells and proteins. Common examples you’ll find in most households are eggs. They’re not nearly complex enough for sentience, but let’s ignore that for now. If you crack an egg into a pan and heat it to, say, 200°C, those proteins denature, that is, they break apart into a disjoint parts that no longer work the way the proteins in egg whites or yolks normally work. This can be generalized: Energy is the enemy of structure. You can destroy pretty much anything if you push enough energy into it. That’s pretty much the operating principle of any of mankind’s many weapons.
Now look at the Sun: Suns are natural fusion reactors; Temperatures are between thousands and millions of degrees. That’s energy in such humongous amounts that anything breaks down. Most of the Sun is just a soup of dissociated nuclear particles. It’s the opposite of structure, the complete lack of connections. The Sun is what you’d build if you wanted to be completely sure of never seeing sentience, at least as we know it.
The Sun is a huge blob of what you could call broken matter, held together by gravity and its huge size. If you wanted to find sentience, the Sun is pretty much the last place anyone would expect to find it.