We Live in the Rarest Type of Planetary System

scientificamerican.com

9 points·joshuahedlund··4 comments

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

Our economists tell us we produce things, implying that given a high enough growth rate and productivity we can do anything, endlessly. We take two things and we end up with more than we started.

This is in opposition to the idea that we take our renewable and non renewable resources (aka gifts of nature) and merely transform them into a different shape.

In the latter case, there is no such thing as production or growth. There are resources that you should conserve and there are resources which you should use before you lose them.

>In the latter case, there is no such thing as production or growth.

The fact that you can't define production or growth in terms of indestructible atoms is presumably why economists don't.

How much of that is just observation bias? My understanding is that our current methods for detecting exoplanets are biased towards certain types of planets that are very different from earth, e.g. Gas giants close to stars

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