Psy-Kosh comments on How inevitable was modern human civilization - data - Less Wrong

30 Post author: taw 20 August 2009 09:42PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (103)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 25 August 2009 07:49:27AM 0 points [-]

Really? Thanks. I thought it mostly was derived from gravitational energy as the earth formed and only a bit of extra nuclear heating. Though I guess it might not make sense that it would still be hot then...

Well, generally, elements heavier than iron only show up when a star goes kablewey, right? so it's "solar", but it's not OUR solar, which was kinda the point, I guess.

Comment author: sketerpot 25 August 2009 09:03:19PM 0 points [-]

Since we've already gone down the rabbit hole of extreme pedantry, I should point out that "solar" properly only applies to our own star, sol. The adjective for stars in general is "stellar". If we ever bring solar panels to the neighborhood of other stars, this is going to be a nasty bit of terminology conflict.

Comment author: knb 25 August 2009 06:02:03PM 0 points [-]

Oh, good point about supernovae. I didn't know that.