• Troy
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    1 year ago

    Missing: any sort of physicist who will tell them both that the forward model says that the sun won’t explode for a few billion years, and so far that model hasn’t been wrong.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Minor correction: in a few billion years our sun will expand into its red giant death phase.

      Also: our star can’t go nova by our understanding of astrophysics. If it actually can, then we might need to throw out a lot of astrophysics, including predictions on when our star will expand.

      Also also: the odds of the dice giving double 6s is MUCH higher than our sun going nova at any point in time even if it could go nova and was overdue.

      • triclops6
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        1 year ago

        That last part is what the Bayesian scientist is wagering on, it’s not missing, as op suggested

        • Neato@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Ah, gotcha. I tried learning Bayesian probability once and failed utterly. One of the only classes I just barely passed (stat was the other). My brain just barely computes it.

          • triclops6
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            1 year ago

            The intuition is exactly your argument:

            When the machine says yes it’s either because

            (1) the sun went nova (vanishingly small chance) and machine rolled truth (prob 35/36) – the joint probability of this (the product) is near zero

            OR

            (2) sun didn’t go nova (prob of basically one) and machine rolled lie (prob 1/36) – joint prob near 1/36

            Think of joint probability as the total likelihood. It is much more likely we are in scenario 2 because the total likelihood of that event (just under 1/36) is astronomically higher than the alternative (near zero)

            I’m skipping stuff but hopefully my words make clear what they math doesn’t always

      • IsoSpandy@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I think our sun can go nova. What it can’t do is supernova based on the Chandrashekhar limit

    • JoBo@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      That is not missing, it’s the entire fucking point of the cartoon.

    • Moghul@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Isn’t our sun too small to explode at all? IIRC the sun will expand enough to engulf the earth’s orbit but will eventually shrink to a dwarf.

      • Troy
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        1 year ago

        Too small to supernova and black hole, yes. But large enough to have a decent boom. Probably at least red giant, then a nova (explosion casting off outer layers) leaving a white dwarf remnant.

        If I’m around by then, my model of medical science progress is wrong ;)

        E: I’m wrong. That casting off of the outer gas envelope is not a nova. It’s just a death throe of some sort.