Can self-replicating species flourish in the interior of a star? (2020) [pdf]
pdfs.semanticscholar.org
pdfs.semanticscholar.org
I am deeply skeptical of any such claim for the inside of a star because of the sheer amount of entropy constantly being jammed in by the environment. A star entity would be made of relatively normal matter (compared to some other things), even mediated through magnetic fields, and would be working on not entirely dissimilar time constraints from us, so it is difficult to see how that could work.
(Contrast Robert Forward's story about critters living on old, relatively quiescent neutron stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg While if I had to bet, I'd bet reality still makes that impossible, at least the Cheela creatures built of degenerate matter would be working with reactions that themselves run much more quickly than our normal matter reactions do, so one can imagine that even though their environment is pumping more entropy in than our environment does per second, perhaps something could run more quickly and pump it out again at rates conventional matter could not. A star creature is in an environment that could run at perhaps modest, single-digit multiples "faster" than us, but is getting enormous multiples more entropy pumped in. I don't see the ratio working out favorably.)
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
(The extended universe of this story is the Fifthist Church, which is usually written as a kind of hippie Scientology and has a pretty different feel.)
I am not a physicist but I think this is a moot point when the entire basis of the paper is string theory and requires the existence of hypothetical monopole particles to encode information like DNA. This is all sounds like wild speculation built on top of the most speculative theoretical physics still active in academia.
Though, again, how to keep any "quasiparticle" coherent/retaining the necessary properites in the middle of a star is, to put it charitably, an open question.
I asked ChatGPT and it claims "It is generally not possible to "pump" entropy out of a system in the same way that it can be added to a system. This is because the second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of a closed system will always tend to increase over time."
And, specifically, living organisms can't be closed systems, because their existence depend on spending energy to decrease their internal entropy, increasing the entropy of the external environment in the process, in order to keep their own entropy low enough to still function without random breakage we would expect from an aging system.
And we all know that entropy always wins in the end, and we always break if we are old enough, so this is a sisyphean task; but we still do it all day every day, because we are afraid to die.
People are used to AI being clunky, unfocused, ungrammatical text, ala markov chain bots from the 2000s. So conversely this kind of verbose, coherent, well-written text appears to be knowledgeable and correct.
I can only hope that deepfakes and such become popular enough that people learn to be less trusting of what they find on the internet.
Could you show examples?
I'm using DeepL to translate things form and to languages that I know very well, usually to double check or get additional inspiration for wording. I've never experienced anything that was completely wrong. The translations are most of the time almost perfect.
But maybe it's a question of language pairs.
I don't usually buy stuff in ads(Actually, I rarely buy anything nonessential without thinking for a week about it), but Google's results usually are interesting, if a bit creepy and echo chambery.
I don't just use Google to learn things and accept the first results, but I do use it as a starting point.
IR systems lack the bootstrapping phase - unless you know precisely what you want to learn you’ll end up in SEO hell sifting through loosely related garbage produced by algorithms to include as many relevant terms but zero insightful knowledge. I think for learning chatGPT is great for bootstrapping, then I turn to IR to refine and get accurate information.
To be honest I've seen only wrong answers form ChatGPT until now.
It can't "think logically" so almost everything is flawed when you look a little bit deeper.
But a lot of people are even much dumber than this bot. So I quite fear the consequences of its existence.
Human :
By what means might entropy be pumped out of one part of a system and into another part?
ChatGPT:
There are several ways that entropy can be transferred from one part of a system to another:
Heat transfer: Entropy can be transferred from a hotter body to a cooler body through heat conduction, convection, or radiation.
Work: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings when work is done on the system.
Mass transfer: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the transfer of matter.
Information transfer: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the transfer of information.
Chemical reactions: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through chemical reactions, either through the production of heat or through the transfer of matter.
Electrical currents: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through electrical currents.
Magnetic fields: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the generation of magnetic fields.
Gravitational fields: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the generation of gravitational fields.They asked about systems, not closed systems. ChatGPT just regurgitated the 2nd law, which is just plain wrong no matter how you slice it. Any physicist asked this question would explain the distinction.
You’ve not talked to many theoretical physicists I see. I’ve not noticed they’re usually that good at explaining things, especially to lay people. They tend to be very good at talking with people at the same level or more advanced, usually in a mathematical form. They tend to be pretty bad at imitating a human.
So what, anyone who gets a wrong idea from ChatGPT is just unsophisticated and we should ignore it? Why are you so incredibly set on invalidating any criticism of ChatGPT?
You don't see a problem with advertising this LLM as something it isn't? Lots of people seem willing to take ChatGPT completely at face value now, and walk away having learned a bunch of nonsense. And lots of them are smart people, they've just been duped by the hype into thinking LLMs can do things they fundamentally can't.
I think GPT just saw "entropy" and "system" and predicted 2nd law. Which is the sort of low effort response you might get if you ask random non-experts on the internet.
Personally I think there's still a lot of value in mere rephrasing, recontextualizing, perspective shifting, and occasional insightful connection that ChatGPT can do even if it's all using information you already ostensibly know.
As it is often said that one never learns a topic more deeply than when they teach it to others, ChatGPT can serve as the ultimate "rubber duck" coworker for any subject. I'm not sure what we can do about users not using critical thinking, or expecting the machine to do that part for them. There are plenty of non-AI sources of misinformation that can readily be taken uncritically too, though, so it's not necessarily a new problem.
Perhaps I've been confused and misled so badly I don't realize it, so all I can really say is I think it's premature to assume people will be any more misled or confused by technologies like ChatGPT when all they have to do now is get on the internet or flip on a TV to be personally targeted with misleading and confusing information already. I think there's very real potential for the technology to give people a lever against misinformation if it helps them understand and explore their own thoughts/thought processes.
I guess to me, fundamentally, it's a question of who's the one with agency over using it, and to what end. I'd be much more comfortable once we can fit models like this on home computers and worry less about them suddenly trying to sell us sponsored products or convince us of some ideology because their creator was paid to do so.
Sure! Here is a function that computes the idiotsecant of a number x:
def idiotsecant(x):
return 1/x
For example, if we call the function with an argument of 2, it will return 0.5, because 1/2 is equal to 0.5.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.
A bomb calorimeter in a chemistry class might be approximated as a closed system for the purposes of thermodynamics. Very few things in nature can.
A super abstract, but physically valid, way of expressing that is that your body is constantly "generating entropy" and it needs to consume energy to fight it. "Pumping out that entropy" is what the body is doing when it takes in energy and uses it to maintain all those gradients.
Life in general may not use organic chemistry, or chemistry at all, but the advantage of this level of abstraction is that any life form (in this universe) will have to do something to "pump out the entropy". It is essentially by definition a deviation from the equilibrium state around it, and it will require energy to maintain.
The point I am making here is that there must be some ability to pump out the entropy faster than it is being generated, or pushed in to the system. Otherwise those gradients and variations from equilibrium will be erased. Inside a sun, there is so much heat energy being pressed in to the system that it is challenging to imagine how any conceivable structure could push it back out again.
This boils down to the observation that "Holy cow, the sun is, like, REALLY HOT!", but, you know, wrapped up in a different formalism that allows us to get past "But what if, like, there's something that could deal with that?". You see this online, the challenge that someone needs to prove that there's no way to build something that could live in the sun. If you don't have thermodynamics as a tool, this isn't even necessarily unreasonable. But thermodynamics gives us a principled way to turn around and say "Any such system would have to have this and that and the other property, and it's really hard to see how plasma and magnetic fields in such a violent environment could have that." It's so not-close that it's not really plausible.
ChatGPT may be referring to the general conceptual space/idea that you can't just build a machine to "reverse entropy" trivially. The most common example of this is that you can't just build an anti-microwave, that remotely cools things by shooting radiation at it in some easy manner. It is sooooo much easier to add entropy than remove it; that is definitely true. In fact, it's kinda a key element of my point here. But you can pump entropy out of a system, in some ways, with some machines, in some manners; since you are literally such a machine yourself, you are an existence proof of that.
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Here’s a snippet for anyone interested
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."Somebody posted something on here awhile back, definitely last 2 years, that suggested a really novel & fun to think about view on “life”, stating that life is a manifold for information through spacetime. DNA must replicate in order to prevent its dissolution into entropy, and life therefore exists because nature threw together the right random shape for the building blocks of self-preserving space-time informational manifolds. I’m doubtlessly paraphrasing and summarizing poorly, but my inner hippie was going “whooaaaa mannnnn far out!!”
[0] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
BUT THATS JUST WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT in that universe XD
jazz hands
This structure would have similar properties (and honestly isn't really that different to) a Dyson Swarm. Assuming thermodynamics holds the only way to get rid of heat ultimately is to radiate it away into space. At any temperature you're likely to get to this is going to be infrared light. The wavelength of radiated heat is solely determined by temperature.
So could you instead radiate away visible light? Technically, yes. Kind of. One way is simply to use a lot less of the energy. Now could you get the temperature up to where this has a visible light signature instead? You're talking about thousands of degrees. What material could get that hot? It's a big problem.
Also, such a material will still have telltale signs. Spectroscopic signature would reveal it wasn't the expected hydrogen-helium mix.
Another possibility is a truly giant star. Stars can get incredibly large. IIRC the largest known star (UY Scuti) if it were placed at the Sun's position would be large enough to swallow Jupiter.
The thing is. These supergiants/hypergiants don't have a hostile boundary or surface in the same way a cloud from a distance looks solid. It would be hot but really diffuse. Technically it would be possible to build within the star's atmosphere and dump the heat.
Accelerando by Charlie Stross is not only about sun-brains, but is also about how they change human society and culture. Good book.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
Note: I have both a dead-tree and kindle edition of this book.
I really like the idea of freeing the lobsters and I agree with the points he makes about "owning" minds.
http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/StarMaker.p...
> One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.
> All this, surely, was good, yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world’s delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.
By which definition, prions would likely be considered to be alive. But I think the consensus is that prions aren't alive, and are just self-replicating proteins.
Due to being in a deep gravitational well, such life and life inside a star are forever isolated from us. Unless they discover a way to use solar flares, in fact, perhaps solar flares are their way to escape the surface of the sun.
It would be magical if both those phenomenon exactly counter each other (I have not run any numbers, but my instinct tells me time dilation will win out).
Don’t you mean 100%? From what I can tell, the radius of a neutron star is about twice its Schwarzschild radius.
The absolute extremes a living organism would need to be able to survive are insane.
Edit: I've misremembered the story and confused stars with gas giants
Instead of chemistry, which I will refer to only by analogy, let's imagine Tinkertoys, the old wooden ones.
0) A tinkertoy ball with zero holes can connect to nothing. It is a monad. It is boring. You can build nothing with it. This is rather like a noble gas. (Hahah yes you can build a cage around Xenon very clever thank you move along)
1) A tinkertoy ball with one hole can connect to another tinkertoy ball. If you have only these, well, you can form pairs with them, but nothing beyond the pairs. This looks like diatomic molecules. You can jumble them about but you cannot build a larger structure with them. Another dead end.
2) A tinkertoy ball with two holes can connect with two other tinkertoy balls with the same number of holes. If this is all you have you can build a long chain, as long as you like. Were it not so ruthlessly hungry for other electrons, ozone, which is to say three oxygen atoms, is a very flawed example. Sulfur, the next Group VI element, is better ... you can make chains of six to thirty sulfurs rather easily.
Let me pause here. This is really a fundamental question: can you do anything interesting with this chain of sulfur atoms? Are there fascinating Van der Waals self-interactions? Can you effectively "knot" these chains, forming a higher level structure? This is the absolute bleeding edge.
I propose that you need to hit ...
3) Tinkertoy balls with three or more holes. At that point you can form branching structures or a flat plane, and so on. This would be your nitrogens and phosphorus-analogues.
My general thought is that, whether you have whole atoms with valence electrons, or wads of nuclei in a neutron star, whatever "chemistry" or equivalent is going on, you need three holes, or the ability to form three connections to other components, to create structure more than a humble chain, and that these connections must be relatively stable. If there is a chemistry analogue occurring on or in a neutron star, or some kind of strange plasma, or really anything, you must have a minimum number of connections to form a large enough structure to be more than just isolated bits of matter.
I will allow that the "chain" model of just two connections might lead to something, but I wouldn't lay money on it.
Granted, I'm a fan of Forward (and his son's work as well), but my guess is that the nucleonic matter alone wouldn't support those kind or number of connections, or "bonds," as fun as it is o think about.
Were they only chains of sulfurs, could we get much out of it? Knots, possibly, I could make room for a knot in the chain of sulfur leading to something interesting, or a vague Van der Waals or other second, even third-order effect, but it's really on the knife edge of possibility.
Of course your right, but what if absolute efficiency doesn't matter all, what if the only thing that matters is relative efficiency? If knots and folds of two bonded atoms could create units with different properties : hydrophobic, and hydrophilic (or the equivalent properties to some other non aquatic medium), forming corkscrews, forming sheets, forming cross chain links - then perhaps it doesn't matter how convoluted the solutions are, perhaps all that matters is whether it is relatively efficient compared to other competing solutions. What I think makes this more than just a hypothetical to ponder is that perhaps this is fundamental to understanding the origins of life. Perhaps early life was complex without being sophisticated, having terribly inefficient metabolic pathways, a chaos of reactions in which only a bare sliver of energy was directed towards useful activities, perhaps the activities of those early cells unfolded slowly over thousands of years and it didn't matter because there was no other life to compete with.
This would be the story of the operators of the the Advanced Technology, er, Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in the day of and years after their unexpected discovery of persistent seemingly life-like patterns of kilometer scale plasma and magnetic fields seemingly triggered below and overlapping in time with the Solar Probe+ perihelion.
The life-like patterns of bright spots are found in the cool molecular layer of the chromosphere below the transition region. The temperature in this layer is so low that many diatomic molecules exist at equilibrium. This is where the gradient of thermal pressure to magnetic pressure is greatest and charged particles undergo "anomalous acceleration" previously unexplained by any detailed mechanism.
http://erewhon.superkuh.com/Plasma-beta-depending-on-the-hei... [The beta of a plasma, symbolized by β, is the ratio of the plasma pressure (p = number of particles*Boltzmann's constant*temperature) to the magnetic pressure (p_mag = magnetic field²/2*magnetic permeability).]
The story would be about the process of science and discovery seen through the eyes of the DKIST and other observatory technicians [not: about the personal and political fallout experienced by the scientists and technicians of DKIST as the various postdocs in the labs compete compete to try to figure out if the patterns really are life and if so what can be learned from them]. As part of this it is also about the science involved in imaging and reconstructing ~50km long bright spots just above the surface of the brightest object in the solar system. After lots of exposition about zeeman splitting, the hanle effect, poynting vectors, crossing number and other topological considerations the shape and nature of the aliens as actual life would be clearer.
The bright points come into being as a result of tension in field lines causing magnetic reconnection creating discrete plasmoids with a definable magnetic helicity handedness. In order to keep stable the plasmoids have to shed magnetic helicity to the solar wind to keep their internal magnetic dynamo from stopping. This requires utilizing opposite helicity magnetic fields that rise from the solar dynamo to the the photosphere below.
As more resources are allocated and data is collected it is found that the plasmoid lifeforms are composed of dynamic arrangements of many plasmoids stuck together in patterns that "eat" opposite sign helicity magnetic flux tubes emerging from active regions. [This process would conclude with shedding single soliton waves via magnetosonic soliton conversion into shock waves that themselves break down into trains of soliton waves that propagate out into the solar wind? Soliton formation requires a balance between convection and dispersion.] The origin of nanoflares, unexplained km scale coherent radio emissions, non-thermal broadening of spectral lines in the transition region, the gamma ray excess and 40 GeV dip, and why the corona is hotter then the surface are finally explained.
Along with this human accomplishment and understanding of the outer sun references should be occasionally made to the uncertainty about the the processes occuring above the tachocline but below the photosphere. Even more mysterious is the dynamo itself in the core known only through inferences made from "G" vibrational modes of the star discovered through doppler measurements of the photosphere surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...