zlacker

Creative fantasy? If life exists in the plasma of a Sun, creating an artificial 'sun' would no more create life than building a crib creates a baby.

>>JoeAlt+(OP)
The implication is that processes happen so much faster at temperatures over a million degrees that all you have to do is create the right conditions and then life evolves immediately from our temporal frame of reference.

So the analogy would be closer to watching a goldilocks planet from the edge of the event horizon of a black hole.

>>JoeAlt+(OP)
The DKIST, a 4m diffraction limited solar telescope on top of a mountain in hawaii https://dkist.nso.edu/, comes online in science mode before the end of the year. It will be able to resolve tens of kilometer scale structures on the sun for the first time. There's still a lot left to be discovered on these small scales as the short timescale coherent radio emissions have indicated for decades. DKIST will give us our first images of whatever is making these very short radio burst... and whatever else is there we didn't predict.

>>shkkmo+w7
Or a computer simulation running at 1 trillion X "real time".

>>JoeAlt+(OP)
Maybe I'm a Crazy Hippie Sun Worshiper, but my take is it's an outlandish creative fantasy to suppose life DOESN'T exist in the sun, with all that hot matter and strong gravity and powerful energy and freaky chaotic shit happening.

>>DonHop+AV
Well, it's possible that it's too chaotic. As Lem points out in the story, we don't know enough about plasma physics to know what kinds of patterns can develop, persist, and reproduce over time in such an environment: true in 01964 and, I think, still true despite substantial advances since then. Maybe, as the story suggests, there's a sufficiently rich set of them that the Sun is teeming with life, with civilizations rising and falling every few hours. But maybe in such hot temperatures only very large structures are stable, like the convection cells we see, so that for purposes of life the whole sun is the size of a ribosome, operating on a time scale a billion times slower.