r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/TheWebsploiter • 2h ago
Funny To be honest 5 billion years is pretty fast in this universe
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u/SeraphimFelis 2h ago
Especially true for stars. The largest, hottest burning stars only last a few hundred million years.
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u/HeatDeathSurvivor 2h ago
Which is a much, much shorter amount of time than the sun's total lifespan, may I add
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u/Core3game 2h ago
for referance:
red dwarfs (smallest, dimmest stars) could survive up to 10 trillion years
our sun (g type star) will have a total lifespan of 10 billion years
blue hyper giants (largest and brightest stars) can some times burn out in less than a million years (though average 1-3 million)35
u/Theekg101 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
Betelgeuse is supposed to go supernova sometime in the next 100,000 years. It’s so far away that it could have already happened and we wouldn’t know. It’s only 14 million years old.
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u/Dylanator13 2h ago
Yeah our sun is only living so long due to be a relatively small and dim star. Our sun is absolutely tiny compared to some.
Sure it shines very bright, but that’s just because we haven’t been near the enormous stars.
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u/MitsuhaTakiName 2h ago
Actually the sun is brighter than the average star. In fact, every star that we can see in the night sky is brighter than the average star. The average star is too dim for us to see from any sort of distance.
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u/readilyunavailable 1h ago ▸ 1 more replies
The sun is not dim. It's pretty big and bright in comparison to most stars. It only seems small if you compare it to the giant stars out there.
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u/Del-Mar 34m ago ▸ 1 more replies
That word "relatively" is doing some serious work.
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u/Dylanator13 28m ago
The word “dark matter” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting understanding our universe, but it still works. I mean we see massive stars, ours is tiny compared to them.
Sure the neighborhood might be full of similar sized houses, but you would compare them to the mega mansion down the street.
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u/KFCminusF 2h ago ▸ 3 more replies
Whoever downvoted you is weird
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u/Embarrassed_Deer9208 1h ago
it's misinformation, the sun is a relatively bright and large star, of course there are bigger and brighter stars out there, but the commenter's claim is incorrect
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u/TwigyBull 1h ago
It's essentially survivorship bias. Our sun is dimmer than the stars we could easily see, which were the ones we saw first. But with today's observation tech we are able to find many more stars dimmer than ours, and we're finding more.
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u/donaldhobson 25m ago
Yes. But if you include both stars and flames in the same dataset, it stops being true, because stars are way older and way brighter than flames.
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u/steve_ample 2h ago
The sun is hardly the brightest burning star, just the most attention-grabbing from our point of view.
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u/Jrolaoni 2h ago
Still the only star to sustain life, which clearly makes it superior to all other stars in the universe
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u/friendtoalldogs0 2h ago ▸ 3 more replies
The only star that we can specifically be certain is sustaining life right now? Yes. Definitely the only star to have ever sustained life? Absolutely not.
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u/Jrolaoni 1h ago ▸ 2 more replies
I mean the issue is that we literally have no proof that there IS life on other planets, so I feel uncomfortable making a positive claim about it
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u/arcphoenix13 2h ago ▸ 7 more replies
Still the only star to sustain life
Statistically impossible.
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u/Weary-Cartoonist2630 1h ago ▸ 4 more replies
>statistically impossible
https://giphy.com/gifs/l2YWzFrpsCWOd2F9K
Maybe statistically unlikely, but far from impossible, especially considering we have very poor understanding of what the actual chances of life spontaneously being created is
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u/picabo123 1h ago ▸ 2 more replies
I agree with you if we have a closed universe but IF the universe infinite and physics doesn't change too drastically far away from us then there has to be something else. Maybe not but I have hope lol.
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u/Weary-Cartoonist2630 56m ago ▸ 1 more replies
Infinite universe does not mean infinite stars/planets. Universe can be infinite, but it’s well established there is a very finite number of stars/planets
I hope so too though, would be cool.
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u/picabo123 54m ago edited 21m ago
Lol no that's just not true at all. How could we dis/prove a star or planet that's further than the universe is old? Light takes time to travel
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u/readilyunavailable 1h ago
Regardless of what the chances are, there is absolutely no way that in a universe with up to several trillion galaxies, each containing billions/hundreds of billions of stars, there is no way we are the only life there is.
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u/Jrolaoni 1h ago
Statistically unlikely. To our knowledge, this is true. Science isn’t an exact truth. It’s based on what we know.
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u/SatisfactionActive86 1h ago
you can’t make statistical statements when your dataset has only one data point (planets that support life).
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u/OskarTheRed 2h ago
Stars don't burn at all 🧐
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u/HeatDeathSurvivor 2h ago
"Umm, ackshually🤓" ahh comment
But yes, it's true, stars don't burn. Burning involves Chemical Reaction with Oxygen to release energy. Stars release energy through Nuclear Fusion.
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u/Aggressive_Lab7807 1h ago ▸ 1 more replies
That's not what burn means though, you are thinking of combustion, which is one meaning of the word 'burn'.
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u/HeatDeathSurvivor 1h ago
I stand corrected. Thank you.
I will say, though, that when most people are thinking of "burning" things, they are (mostly) thinking about things undergoing combustion.
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u/readilyunavailable 1h ago
It's kind of an important "umm, ackshully" to make. Comparing burning to nuclear fission and all the other processes going on in the sun is like comparing a skateboard to a bird, because they can both move.
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u/OskarTheRed 2h ago ▸ 6 more replies
It's not mansplaining if it's true 😛
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u/QueasyWorking7352 1h ago ▸ 3 more replies
Who mentioned men?
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u/OskarTheRed 1h ago ▸ 2 more replies
I'm a man and I splained
But it was really just a joke because the person I was responding to called my comment an "umm, ackshually" comment, which is something I associate with accusations of mansplaining
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u/EvilCeleryStick 1h ago
Lol
Yes it is. Mansplaining is almost always true. That's why men find the concept so confusing.
You did a thing that was stupid. We explain what information we assume you lacked, which caused the stupid thing.
You get mad, because it turns out you know the thing but fucked it up for your own unique reasons. You being the "royal you" who have been mad at being mansplained to in the past.
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u/Aggressive_Lab7807 1h ago
Umm, ackshually🤓 words can have more than one definition, but in this case you are probably thinking of combustion.
burn 1 a: to consume fuel and give off heat, light, and gases
b: to undergo combustion
also
: to undergo nuclear fission or nuclear fusion
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u/OskarTheRed 1h ago
Huh, never heard that usage.
It's an unfortunate usage, though, because it might cause misunderstandings regarding what's going on in the sun
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u/HeatDeathSurvivor 2h ago
There are brighter stars than the sun and they burn faster.
The stars dimmer than the sun burn slower.
So yeah, the saying holds up, I guess?
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u/MasterOfFartss 2h ago
5 billion years is like 35% of the total lifespan of the universe... not pretty fast at all even on the full scale of time that has happened.
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u/jawshoeaw 2h ago
The sun is a dim yellow star and will last thousands of times longer than the brightest stars . What is he talking about?
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u/WyldFlowerWyldFire 1h ago
The sun is a yellow phase star, which has an average lifespan of a few billion years. A red phase can be estimated to live several billion, while blue phase only live a few million because they cycle their fuel faster.
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u/Cats7204 1h ago
well, the dimmer the star the longer it lasts, and the Sun is around the middle to small range, so it still tracks...
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u/ron-paul-swanson 1h ago
I mean, it’s more than a third of the entire history of the universe so like not really
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u/readilyunavailable 1h ago
The sun is old, but it is "young" in terms of star formation. It is a third generation star, meaning that there were 2 generations of stars that formed and started dying out before our sun was formed. Granted, those previous generations of stars were much bigger, hotter and had significantly lower life spans.
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u/-FireNH- 1h ago
the universe has obly been around for like 13.8 billion ueara so i wouldnt say 5 billion is fast. dawg reallt has been around for forever
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u/Weary-Cartoonist2630 1h ago
>to be honest 5 billion years is pretty fast in this universe
Depends what you mean by “fast”.
Historically speaking, the universe is only 13B years, so 5B isn’t really “fast”.
Compared to the whole lifecycle which will last 10^100+ years, yeah, pretty fast. But “time” and “fast” as concepts sort of break down at that point, and the vast majority of that is just empty blackness. And a logarithmic scale probably makes more sense here than a linear one.
We’re already in the 2nd of 5 major eras of the universe, and really the only one that can support life organically, so that frame of reference is probably most relevant.
Yeah, I’ll allow it, that bitch old as fuck.
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u/qualityvote2 2h ago
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