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Comment by InDemoVeritas | Hacker News Reader

I saw it! A tiny, shiny speck under the microscope, and the thrill of seeing a form of matter which, it can be argued, has never existed anywhere in the universe. Ever.

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I'm being pedantic, but should be "human knowledge", not "universe". It is absurdly unlikely that the conditions needed for this substance to exist never occurred in the ~1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 star systems in the known universe. "conditions needed" includes intelligent life creating these substances.

Would the pressures in a Jovian not be enough to form metallic hydrogen?

To get solid metallic hydrogen, you'd need both high pressure and low temperatures; in the celestial bodies that can provide the former, the latter seems unlikely.

Jupiter is indeed believed to have a liquid metallic hydrogen core, which is the source of its enormous magnetic field:

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/0...

By Jove?!

Your attempt at humour has been rightly sanctioned, but you weren't all that far from the mark. Jove is another name for the roman god Jupiter, and as such a Jovian planet is one that resembles Jupiter - ie. large gas giants, where metallic hydrogen is certainly thought to exist in nature.

Not by Jove - inside Jove.

That not only assumes it could never happen naturally, but also that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.

The aliens working undercover among us now are rolling their 7 photoreceptors at our anthropocentrism.

Are you assuming there's no other intelligent life in the universe? :-)

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