Space Forum / Astronomy / September 2008

Yes,

That's were the aliens are hiding in our own sun... so we will never find
them ;)

Bye,
 Skybuck =D

Just like we cannot survive in -100^ C Because all water in our body
will turn into ice and blood will become solid.

Those living on the sun cannot survive at temperature on earth. So how
can we contact them. If we touch them we will die as they will be
100,000,000 ^ C and if they come near us we will start burning.

Bye
Sanny

Too hot for organic life perhaps, but there could be other types of
life.

Perhaps the sun itself has a consciousness, and then the sun itself
would be a type of life.

If it can't have sex, then it isn't life, Sanny!  lmao!  There are
many things which no matter how you combine them won't form a living
thing.

No sex leads to EXTINCTION!

There is NO LIQUID ON THE SUN!  Repeat 1 million times:  The Sun is
all gas!  A bit above 212 degrees F. there is NO life.  Can asbestos
think?  I don't think (!) so.  Reread what I wrote about intelligent
red clams on Mars.  lmao!

Your views on life are about as well-informed as your views on the
Sun.

Do you dream this sh.t up in your sleep?

Saul Levy

Hey Sanny,my uncle Don claimed to have been born on the Sun, but
unfortunately the authorities did no belive this, when they closed
down his still and took him away to the 'rest home'.

Harry C.

And that is just how ignorant people are when they say life cannot be on
Mars, or Venus, or Saturn, or Pluto...or the Moon...or yes, even the Sun.

As was said on Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way."

"Life" implies organization - reduction of entropy.  All life forms of
whatever nature may be described as more organized arrangements of the
substance of their environment.

When the environment is one of matter found in the periodic table of
the elements, "life" must be composed of *organized* forms of that
matter.

To organize matter found in the periodic table, two or more atoms must
be attached to each other.

The state of MAXIMUM entropy (i.e. the absence of all possible life)
is one in which no two atoms are connected together even momentarily.
It is a state in which each atom goes its own way without regard for
anything any other individual atom may be doing.

The sun is composed of, among other things, helium.  Helium has an
ionization energy of about 24.5 electron-volts.  This is the highest
ionization energy of any element that can be placed on the periodic
table.

This means that there is a temperature above which the thermal
agitation is sufficient to ionized even helium atoms.  IIRC, this
temperature is about 3800° - 4500° K.

Because it has the highest ionization energy of all possible chemical
elements, when helium is ionized, everything else is also ionized.
Electrons have been removed and all that remains is positively charged
ions drifting aimlessly in a sea of hot electrons.

Positive ions cannot form bonds to each other.  They cannot form
organized structures.  Molecules of any kind cannot exist in a helium
plasma.

The temperature of the photosphere (the visible "surface" of the sun)
averages about 5800° K
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosphere

The sun is simply too hot for ANY organized chemical structures to
form.

The most "organized" structures that can form in the sun are purely
physical and temporary 'structures' called convection cells:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection_cell
which last only a few minutes, and are no more alive than similar
convection cells here on earth (called "thunderstorms").

Tom Davidson
Richmond, VA

With respect to organic life like carbon based life on earth no... but
you don't mean that... you mean can there be other things...

One of the mysteries of life is that it seems to occur whenever there
is an information accumulation or in other words whenever there is an
ongoing decrease in entropy. In fact, one may posit a ongoing decrease
in entropy as a defining characteristic of life. That is why there is
interest with respect to computers as to whether they are alive
because they in fact can store information. We know that our brains
store information and we know we are alive so we can make the working
assumption that any ongoing ability to store of information will
result in some life form. This is an hypothesis not a statement of
fact. In a sense our lives are as a result of the sun loosing a little
of what it would need to support life and giving that to us. That is
why most life on the earth is dependent on a food chain that
terminates with light from the sun.

So your question becomes, could there be something on the sun that
could store information.

The answer lies, in my mind in the second law of thermodynamics. Life
on earth is dependent on energy from the sun because it then breaks
the isolation of the system and allows the buildup of information.
Without that you can't build information and given our working
characteristic of life you can't have it.

So there are two possibilities. One that an external energy source is
providing energy to the sun and that will allow the organization of
some form of matter or else that there is some zone on the sun that is
different from some other zone and that is receiving energy from and
internal transfer.

My understanding is that the sun is broadcasting energy and there are
no non-negligible external sources of energy. That would mean the sun
as a whole cannot be a brain.

The next question is whether part of the sun could. The problem there,
is to find some subset of the sun that is capable of storing
information in an ongoing fashion.

There does not appear to be states available in any of the physical
processes. In fact all of the models that I am aware of, I am not a
solar scientist but have only a layman's grasp of the sun, still all
of the models have the physics represented by statistical equilibrium
rather than a buildup of information.

So the real trick is to find some physical states that could be
organized in the physics of the sun. I am afraid I know of none. The
information in our brains appears to be stored in mechanical
structures requiring matter organized in the solid state. In other
words it is the arrangement of atoms into structures that appears to
be where the information is stored. This structuring is inherent in
the process of information storage. There are no such solid structures
in the sun as the heat would destroy them.

So in a sense the answer is simply that the sun, due to its
temperature, is far too fluid a place to have life. There are no
physical states that can receive and store information.

The one other possibility is that the sun, as it is part of larger
structures, could be like an atom is in a body, a piece of a much
larger sized brain. Unfortunately it doesn't look that way to me. When
we look at large scale formations in the universe it does not seem to
be organized into a computer-like structure. In fact it appears to be
more like dust than a structure.

So every way I can think of saying yes to the answer seems to have a
road block.

The only possibility left would be for the sun to support life without
corresponding physical organization. There is no current theory that
rejects that as an option but there is a problem with that. The
problem is that it could not communicate with us through our senses as
that would mean that the sun was somehow organizing and it is not. So
if there is life in the sun we won't be able to know it unless it
turns out there is non-physical communication.

If there is that communication, then there can be life in the sun that
is not associated with the physics of the sun but only associated with
its location. If you believe that consciousness requires the physical
arrangement of some matter, that life is inherently corporal, then
this is impossible. In any case I know of no one who has communication
from beings living in the sun and sense the burden of proof would be
on those that conclude that there is life there, then I conclude,
absent that proof there is no life there.

So again I keep coming up with the no answer.

Too bad. It would be neat.

NO the Suns gasses are way to Hot to Burn.
But they do make the Loudest Noises of anything in our Solar System.

*curmudgeon*
"The best read illiterate in the country"

[snip rest of crap]

At night, forever running before the terminator.

An example of ruptured Sannytation.

Life is on the Sun right now even as we speak...

...for the simple reason that we are talking about it.

How for heaven's sake can one talk about nothing?

I understand that the Israeli Space Agency plans
a manned landing on the Sun.

To avoid the heat,
they plan to land at night.

( And leave before sunrise. )

They used General Relativity to plan the trip.

There aren't even liquids on the Sun.  At its temperature, everything
is a gas.  Can you imagine life in gaseous form?

Uncle Ben

If life existed on or in the sun, it'd probably be some type of
gaseous
plasma critter, nothing like anything on this planet.

W : )

One can abstract away the chemistry of terrestrial life, or indeed any
chemistry at all.  But one cannot abstract away, as far as I can tell,
the element of structure.  So your question would seem to be: "Can
matter under the conditions of the surface or interior of the sun
support complex structures persistent enough to allow the kinds of
behaviors we might recognize as a life "?

My first reaction is “no”, but I don’t know enough to give a better
answer.  The structural substrate of life need not have the same
scales of length and time as life forms we are familiar with.  There
is a lot of elbow room in the Sun!  There might be “microbes”
kilometers across.

Given some kind of substrate, that is.  At least the Sun is far from
dead in the colloquial sense that it is turbulently active: it’s not a
featureless glowing ball of gas.    It seems to have weather, and
quite a lot of it!  But can this turbulence support structures that
mimic the role of molecules in life on Earth?  I don’t know.