Tag Archives: life

Is our solar system the most unique in the universe?

Grappling with assumptions and knowledge bias

Say you are going to visit someone, but for thought-experiment reasons you know absolutely nothing about them, not even their name or gender or anything of the like. What can you confidently say about this person you don’t even know?

Well you can confidently say that they’re human, since I did specify that they were a “person,” and since there’s no evidence aliens exist on Earth. That means they eat food and breath air and all that other stuff. But besides the most vague generalities about human nature, you cannot confidently assert *anything* about them. If I forced you to guess about their qualities, you would only be able to guess the vaguest things that are almost universal among humans, like their physical traits (probably 2 arms and 2 legs) or human universalities (probably love their family, probably like food and traveling).

The only things you can confidently say about this person would be the *common and non-unique traits* that they probably share with all other humans. Because with so little to go on, it would be illogical to assume a set of very unique traits instead.

But then I tell you this person is an American. OK, you can now assume they almost certainly speak English (though it’s not totally certain, and they could always be a baby or a mute anyway). You can assume they know at least some of the cultural touchstones of Americanism (although again, they could be a baby), like they’ve heard the Star Spangled Banner, and they know what Star Wars and Marvel Movies are. They probably know that Hollywood is famous for movies, and that Texas is famous for oil.

But can you confidently say that they are a basketball player? Do you know if they enjoy Handel, Hershel, and Bach? Can you say anything about their politics wahtsoever?

If I then tell you they’re a climatologist, you get even more details. They’re likely on the left-side of the political spectrum. They’re almost certainly well-educated (a pre-requisite for climatology), and they’re far more likely to be an office worker than a manual laborer (although I guess *someone* has to install all those temperature stations).

Now let’s say that this person you’re going to meet is my friend Dave, who’s about 25 years old. Dave is a great basketball player, but he hates watching it because “the modern game is boring.” He likes jazz renditions of famous Baroque music. He plays Minecraft fanatically, although he’s never modded it. And he is a climatologist working at a local university, but he’s also deeply religious and prays before every meal.

The less you knew about Dave, the more generic he seemed. Just a person? There’s 8 billion of those. An American? They’re also common. Even a climatologist doesn’t seem unreasonably unique or special.

But when I gave you more details about his personality, he suddenly seemed fairly out of the ordinary: he’s both sporty and sciency, he’s young but also religious, he plays a popular game sure, but he also likes an incredibly eclectic style of music.

But is Dave *actually* unique? Or does his appearance of uniqueness come from *our knowledge* of him? I’d hazard than many of you can think of people in your lives with an even more unique set of traits, compared to the very few things I’ve told you about Dave. And when I was slowly describing Dave, before you knew how unique he was, you had to fill in the blanks with guesses based on common traits. This is true of anyone we don’t know well. People seem more common as we know less about them, more unique as we know more.

For every person we’ve ever met, we have a very limited set of knowledge about them, and we fill in whatever blanks exist with the “most likely” choices. That’s why even your parents or loved ones can still surprise you, as you may not have known that they did drugs in college, or ran a local newspaper, and you had just filled in those blanks with something else before they told you.

But that means that by definition, we default to assuming everyone around us has “common” and “ordinary” sets of traits. I’d hazard a guess that every person in the world has some set of traits that makes them extremely unique or out of the ordinary, even if these are things that you’d only know if you were close friends with them.

The office worker who reads about 2 books a week: that’s very out of the ordinary. The financial analyst who’s written a dozen murder mysteries: that’s very uncommon. The American who speaks fluent Korean: this is less common in America than having written a book. But if all you knew was “office worker,” “financial analyst,” or “American,” you’d think these people were more normal and less unique than my friend Dave up there, even if they end up being as or more unique than him when you know all their traits.

Extraordinary-ness is realized as we get more and more data about a person, as we find more and more things that are clearly *outliers* to the common trends. Because until we know those things, we naturally fill in the gaps in our knowledge with the “ordinary” placeholders, the “expected” values.

And the reason I’m talking about all that is that I’m almost certain this though process underlies claims about the uniqueness of our own sun and planet.

The Fermi Paradox and the Rare Earth Hypothesis

To shift gears slightly: many people have pondered about why Earth hasn’t been visited by aliens yet. If there are billions of stars in the Universe, and the Universe has existed for billions of years, then there should have been plenty of time for alien species to evolve, become technologically advanced, and start joyriding around the galaxy. As Enrico Fermi said: “where is everyone?”

A potential answer people have caught on is that intelligent life is unbelievably uncommon, and that Earth just happened to have a very very specific set of Astronomical circumstances that made life, and intelligent life, possible. Under this “Rare Earth Hypothesis,” life may evolve around only one in a quadrillion stars, there may only be a *single* life-bearing world in our galaxy: Earth.

Our planet and solar system do seem very rare. In the search for exoplanets, we rarely find ones with lots of gas giants so *far* away from their star, most gas giants appear way closer than ours do. Our sun also isn’t a binary star (like most sun-like stars are), and it has fewer flares and superflares.

But I would contend that, like my friend Dave above, we only notice our solar system’s “uniqueness” because we know so MUCH about our Sun and so LITTLE about exoplanets and their stars. We are *assuming regularity on all the variables we don’t have data for.*

Like, let’s take one of those stars that has a Jupiter-like gas giant orbiting close to the star. Maybe some of those Jupiters have large, rocky moons with complete atmospheres, and maybe these moons can support liquid water, which could support life. That’s probably uncommon, but is it more or less uncommon than our own system having its gas giants so far away?

Our planet has a very large moon, but are there exoplanets with rarer configurations, like an Earth sized planet with 4 or more smaller moons? Or an Earth sized planet with Saturn-like rings?

And our sun has unusually few flares, but is there a planet out there with an unusually strong magnetic field and an unusually thick water atmosphere, one that can easily protect its life-bearing planet from life-killing solar flares?

For this last example, let’s imagine that life has indeed evolved on such a world, intelligent life. They, like us, might think they’re the only life in the universe. They, like us, might think that their planet is unbelievably unique, and that their specific uniquenesses are what allowed their solar system to have life.

Maybe their solar system has a large gas giant orbitting close to the star, and the gas giant’s magnetic field, combine with their own planet’s uniqueness, serves to limit the damage of stellar flars coming to their planet. The gas giant could act like a kind of “shield,” sitting between their own planet and their star, too small to dim the star’s light, but with an incredibly strong magnetic field that blocks the force of any Coronal Mass Ejections (the technical name of large stellar flares).

These people might say “well of course life only evolved on *our* planet, how common is it to have a rocky terrestrial planet outside the orbit of a gas giant? We’ve never seen that in exoplanets. And our gas giant plus or magnetic field are unusually good at protecting us from solar flares. And since essentially all stars have large solar flares, then all planets but our own get blasted to death by Coronal Mass Ejections before intelligent life can evolve.”

But they wouldn’t be right, because we on Earth would still exist. And they’d be assuming every other star out there was “normal,” that there wasn’t a rocky planet *closer to its star* than a gas giant, orbiting an unusually quiet star. And since it would be so hard to get data on *our* star, they’d see our star and assume it was just another “ordinary” lifeless system (we’d have trouble knowing our own star had planets if we didn’t orbit it, it’s difficult to see by the most common measurement techniques)

See, I think Earth only seems *rare* because of how much we know about it. Just like Dave only seems *unique* because of how much I told you about him. If I’d just given you his more common traits (he’s 25, American, plays sports), he wouldn’t seem that unique or special at all.

The jar of marbles thought experiment

Imagine for instance that there’s a jar with 100 marbles in it, each numbered 1 to 100. You pull out number 8 and, aha! This is an exceptionally unique marble! No other marble has this specific number on it, and this marble is 1 in 100, isn’t that unique?

But in this jar, ALL the marbles are unique, they’re ALL 1 in 100. They’re just unique in different ways by having different numbers on them.

Or if you prefer, let’s say the jar of marbles has 999,900 marbles that are unlabeled, and 100 marbles numbered 1 to 100. Again you pull out marble number 8 and, aha, this time it’s even MORE unique! This time it’s a 1 in a MILLION marble! No other marble has this number!

But again, the numbered marbles are ALL 1 in a million, they have different numbers on them, different “things that make them unique,” but they are all still unique.

This marble thought experiment is how I think of the rare Earth hypothesis. Yes our Earth is rare, it’s got a number on it (life), and we think most other stars in the galaxy don’t have life, we assume most of them are unnumbered. But just because we’re 1 of a kind, with our own special number ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE’S, doesn’t mean that another marble with another number doesn’t exist somewhere in the Galaxy, even somewhere close by.

We assume that life can only evolve if the marble has the number 8 on it, ie if a planet and solar system have our very unique set of traits (gas giant arrangement, large moon, quiet star, etc). But we don’t have telescopes powerful enough to *see the numbers* on any other marbles out in the galaxy, so we don’t know for sure if they have life or not. We assume that they are normal, that they have all the “common” traits stars have and that they don’t have anything special on them that would make them unique or life-bearing. But we don’t know.

There could be a number 9 marble right next door to us, a planet orbiting a star with its own collection of unique traits completely different from ours, but thinking just as we do that they are the only life-bearing system in the entire galaxy, because our star doesn’t have their star’s unique traits.

And they’d be wrong. And we’d be wrong too. Just something to think about: we should be more humble when trying to argue from “uniqueness.”

Anyway I still want to post part 2 of my fusion power post, so stay tuned for that very soon.

The demotivation spiral

I’ve been lacking motivation recently, lacking the drive to do all the things I want to do. So I don’t do things.

That makes me depressed that I haven’t gotten anything done. So I get even more demotivated. So I don’t do more things.

This spiral is a bad place to be in. I’m trying to get out. I’m going to set goals to work out on specific days (MWF). I’m setting measurable deadlines for things to get done in both my work and my personal life. I’m going to set goals to reach out to my friends more often, because being with friends always motivates me.

And I’m going to try to get less depressed when things don’t go right. I think that’s been part of the problem, when things go poorly I take it too hard on myself.

I’m a scientist, the hallmark of science is that while we can predict what may happen, we then have to test it through experiments. If our experiments go a certain way, then our prediction was wrong and we have to find out what to do now. That’s just part of science, it’s all part of the process.

But when my experiments aren’t going as I expected them to, I take it too personally. I haven’t yet learned enough how to step back and just accept it, just find out what happened, alter the conditions, and revise the predictions. Instead I keep wondering if I myself am to blame, and if I myself and uniquely unqualified to do this job I’ve been doing my entire adult life.

What makes people successful isn’t just a single moment of brilliance, but a determination to keep being brilliant, which takes work. Whether its physical determination, mental fortitude in the case of adversity, or what have you, success if a pattern of behavior, not a lottery ticket.

And I need to remember that and act like that. It won’t help me if I just get things right once and then rest on my laurels, that won’t bring success. And likewise it won’t help me to mope about whenever I get things wrong.

This is all something that I’m sure everyone deals with, no one needs me to tell them, but it’s something I want to tell myself and I feel like writing it down is the best way to do that.

I need to keep going, keep trying, and keep acting like this matters, even in the face of failure. Letting every failure spiral me further into depression is just a recipe for more failure.

Would you work more hours if it meant you didn’t have to do housework?

I don’t have a catchier title, but this *is* a question I’ve been pondering. When I was young I thought that having someone else do housework for you was the height of luxury, but these days it doesn’t seem to be that uncommon. I don’t know anyone who paints their own fence, mows their own yard, or cleans their own roof. These jobs used to be seen as just part of owning a house, either you did it or you forced your kid to do it as part of their chores. But it seems nowadays most people hire professionals to do it instead.

Even the most basic housework has been outsourced, with services available to clean your bathroom and kitchen twice a month, or your whole house if you like. And of course think about restaurants and fast food: eating outside your own home has almost doubled in the past 50 years. That’s a lot less meals that people have to cook, a lot less dishes they have to clean, and even less groceries that they have to buy.

So housework is being outsourced, and is it related to how Americans seem to work many more hours than the rest of the developed world?

Shifting gears now, I’ve written before about the Europe vs America economic debates. Inevitably in such debates, the conversation shifts to working hours, workers in Europe work less hours than workers in America.

But Josh Barro on twitter has pushed back against claims about European quality-of-life: they don’t have dryers. Reddit too has a huge thread about the lack of dryers and high-energy appliances in Europe. Can a place without such creature comforts really be comfortable?

I don’t want to dwell on the dryer debate. Yes Europeans can dry their clothes in the sun. Yes, it may be cheaper. But does it require more work? Is an electric dryer not a labor-saving device that lets you cut out the work of hanging up your clothes and taking them down?

And coming back to housework, doesn’t paying someone to do your housework also save you from doing that labor? And if so, how much is your time worth it to you? To restate the question from the title of this post: if working 45 hours a week instead of 40 meant you never had to do housework, would you take it?

Some people like doing housework, I get that. But for most people, it’s a chore. And so I wonder if Americans on the whole have made a choice: they work more at work so they can work less at home, and I wonder if anyone has quantified this. European’s extra housework may not show up in the metrics, but it should still be quantified to know if Americans really do “work more hours.”

Working at work vs working at home is a dichotomy any student of economic history understands. When women first entered the private sector workforce, it didn’t mean that women *started working*, and that they weren’t working before that. Women had been doing work at home without pay since the dawn of time. If you calculate the labor done by homebound women and compare it to the paid labor plus housework done by working women, women’s’ overall working hours went down when they entered the workforce. They could use the money they made at work to pay for other people’s labor or labor-saving devices at home.

Men had also taken this leap from housework to paid work centuries before. During the days of subsistance farming, men, women, everyone had to do a hell of a lot of odd jobs to keep themselves housed, clothed, and fed, even when they weren’t actively “working” on their farm. This is why claims of how few hours medieval farmers worked are so misleading: they had many “holidays,” sure, but besides attending church those days would still be spent doing work around the house even if they wouldn’t be spent in the field.

If you were a medieval peasant, you might have a roof that needs mending, food that needs preserving, you need a new chair to fix the old one, a new patch to cover the hole in your cloak, and you had to do all this yourself or it wouldn’t get done. It didn’t show up in “hours worked” because it’s housework in the home. But it still needed to be done to maintain quality of life.

When men started moving from farms to factories, they traded their labor in for money, and could then use that money to *have their roof fixed, buy their own food, buy a new chair, or have their cloak patched*. They could use money to get someone else to do labor for them. They started working *less hours* when you account for both house work and factory work.

Factories workers worked a *lot*. But subsistence farmers worked far more for far less. But if you only calculate “hours worked” using work *outside* the house, then you’d wrongly conclude that subsistence farmers lived cushy lives and that women’s liberation destroyed women’s free time. Nothing could be further from the truth, instead, people these days work much more outside the house in exchange for working much less in it.

And I wonder how much that feeds in to the America vs Europe debate on working hours. How much labor do Europeans do around their homes that Americans *don’t* do. How much labor do Americans save by using dryers, by hiring landscapers, by hiring homecleaners, and are they happy with the extra hours they work to afford that? Do Americans work more hours to save themselves from housework?

Cheating cheaters

I haven’t written in far too long, so here’s the streams of my consciousness.

I recently learned an acquaintance of mine cheated a fair bit in college. They took classes during COVID, and have confessed to cheating on the at-home exams for difficult classes during the time when distance learning was new and Universities were lax.

I wish I could say otherwise, but it does lower my opinion of this person.

I don’t like cheating at all. A recent bugbear of mine has been the increase in “cheating” I’m seeing on the roads. This may sound like a topic change, but hear me out:

We all have a duty to drive safely. That means obeying posted speed limits, obeying lights, no unsafe behavior. Any car breaking this duty makes the roads less safe for all of us. But we all know why so many cars speed, run red lights, or make right turns from the far left lane: it gets them home faster.

They want to get to where they’re going ASAP and they don’t care how unsafe they make the road. Not just for themselves, but for all the cars around them who now have to swerve out of the way of their dangerous driving and maybe cause secondary wrecks in the process.

Dangerous drivers cheat the system that keeps us safe for very minor gains. And I really despise it. Deaths on the roads have continued to increase year after year since the pandemic, and it seems no city or police force is willing to tackle this. An increase in death is just what the city government wants I guess, revealed preference and all that.

They could halt the dangerous drivers by enforcing traffic laws. Have cops patrol the street, give tickets to any speeder, anyone running a red. Automate the ticketing process if need be, revoke people’s license for dangerous driving, and jail them for years if they drive without a license. Time and time again, research has shown that vigilant enforcement is the only mechanism to reduce lawlessness. If less than 1% of the lawbreakers are ever punished, why wouldn’t everyone break the law?

In times like this you can only fall back on your own morality. Your own willingness to obey the social contract and not endanger your neighbors, even if it would benefit you to get home a few minutes earlier. But many people can’t do that, and so they drive like maniacs.

Going back to my acquaintance, they told their cheating story to me in a moment of weakness. They are struggling a lot with their current work, and I wonder if they revealed this in part as a way to say-without-saying “I’m so stupid, I only succeeded by cheating.” I think this person is smart, but doesn’t know how to apply their effort properly. They feel like they’re grinding themselves into dust to succeed yet still failing. I feel like they’ve completely misplaced their efforts, and they need to step back and analyze the situation instead of just grinding harder and harder for no gain.

But while I hate to admit it, this revelation does color my opinion of them just a bit. I can’t say I’ve been unmoved by the desire to cheat. I can’t say there weren’t times when I wished I could just crack open a book during the test, or ask someone to write a paper for me.

I tell a story that maybe the real reason I never cheated was I was too unimaginative or even lazy to do so. I resisted getting a smart phone until almost the end of college. I never wanted to write notes in tiny writing that I could look at during the test.

Once, in high school, I remember having to write a paper and wishing someone else could do it for me. I did a bit of googling and sure enough there was a website I could find that seemed to have a pre-written paper on exactly my topic. But clicking the link, I could only read the first 2 sentences before a pop-up demanded payment. And as a high schooler without a credit card to my name, I closed the link and went back to procrastinating until I FINALLY wrote the paper myself.

But while I’ve toyed with the idea of cheating, I never fell into it. My acquaintance clearly did.

Everyone justifies their actions of course. “It wasn’t even in my major, so I would never have to know this stuff again, why not cheat” (blatant lie, it was a pre-req for further classes, and I don’t know why they’d even lie about it this).

“I liked the first half of the course, but the second half was just all memorization and it was so boring” (I know the course myself, you shouldn’t be memorizing, you should be studying patterns. You should have studied smarter instead of studied harder, learn the patterns and you don’t need to memorize).

But while it reduces my opinion of them a little, I still think (know?) this person is bright and CAN succeed if they just learn how to properly place their effort. Then again, maybe this cheating story shows a pattern. They didn’t know how to spend their effort to find patterns instead of memorizing, so in the end their only recourse was cheating. They don’t know how to spend their effort now… there won’t be any recourse if they can’t figure it out.

New job, new regrets

I’m starting a new job soon. As a scientist, I feel like you go into every job hoping you’ll accomplish something. Not just keep the lights on or stay out of trouble, but to actually create or discover something that’s never been seen before.

I had a lot of hopes when I joined my current job, and few to any of them have panned out. Maybe I was unrealistic or overoptimistic, or just plain unlucky and I shouldn’t feel bad, but I do feel bad and wish I could have done more.

As I go into my final days in this office, at this job, I look at all the data I have and the people I’m training to replace me, and I feel like maybe with a little bit more time, I could accomplish what I’d planned. I could create something publishable and really add to the field. But then after a few days of that feeling, I’ll run into a new unsolvable problem and be right back where I started, feeling certain that I’ll never accomplish what I wanted at this job.

I don’t know, I don’t want to get into too many specifics because the technical details would bore my readers, but the hopes I had when entering this job didn’t match the regrets I have leaving it. I wish I could have done more, but I don’t know how. And I’m worried that the work I *did* do will be forgotten and ignored by my coworkers who are still there, since I never got my work into a publishable state.

If I were in it for the money, I wouldn’t be in science. I just wish I could get the discoveries that I *am* in it for.