yaddlezap818 Posted September 2, 2015 Posted September 2, 2015 If the universe's star formation is to last around 100 trillion years and we are currently only about 14 billion years into that epoch, would it be correct to say that our (humanity's) particular slice of time is a "six-sigma" event when placed in the context of possible or potential slices of time? Not to be misunderstood though, I realize picking out any one moment from practically any range of time could said to be abnormally unlikely. What I'm referring to is the chunk of time that one would expect us to exist within, given the timeline and all of the stars existing on it. So, in the current model of the universe, would one not expect the graph of stars existing across those 100 trillion years to be more or less gathered toward the middle like a bell-curve graph? Or even if a more evenly distributed graph appears across those 100 trillion years, is it not even a little surprising that our existence is within the first 0.014% of the possible timeline? As a possible answer to this anomaly, perhaps a multiverse model going (perhaps infinitely) backward in time as well as forward makes this particular observation not so special, as our particular slice would no longer be abnormally early in that infinite timeline context.
Acme Posted September 2, 2015 Posted September 2, 2015 Since our existence is the only life we know of and because we don't know the exact circumstance of its starting, I don't think we have enough information to make a judgment about whether we're early or not. The solar system is 4.5 billion years old and this planet is likely to get roasty in another 4 billion years, so in the 14 billion years of the universe there's plenty of room for other existences to have come and gone. For them we have come too late. 1
yaddlezap818 Posted September 5, 2015 Author Posted September 5, 2015 The info in this article was really sort of the answer I was looking for...It looks like the dice-rolling (of new stars being made) has pretty much already happened, which would thus make our existence in the timeframe that it happened, not so special: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/universe-making-stars/
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