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Capla comments on Against Maturity - LessWrong
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Practically? Or am I missing the reference?
As I've pointed out before, people on the Internet are depressingly literal, so any argument needs to be full of useless qualifiers to prevent it from getting pounced on by people who don't understand context. If he didn't say that, some idiot probably would have asked him how he didn't know that some object in the sky was 49.9999% to stardom last year and 50.0001% to stardom this year.
I am assuming, that Eliezer know more than I do, but in order for there to be a star in the sky that is younger than him, it would need to both have formed within about 30 years and be within 30 light-years. That seems to be an improbable combination.
A cursory internet search (hindered by Google recognizing "star" to mean "actor") reveals no new near stars. Anyone want to enlighten me?
One reasonable approach would be to interpret "young star" as a "star that recently became visible to the naked eye".
By the way, a question -- as far as I understand the standard way for a new star to form is to have a cloud of matter gravitationally aggregate into a sufficiently dense object which then ignites. Is the ignition a short event -- how long does it take? In other words, is there a sharp boundary between a "dense cloud, not yet a star" and a "young star"?
It takes a while, although it's relatively short compared to a star's lifetime -- about ten million years for a solar-mass star, followed by a longer period as a young star that's still gaining energy from gravitational collapse. Higher-mass stars form faster, but I wouldn't expect even the heaviest to form on human timescales.
A complication from an observer's perspective is that this sort of thing usually happens inside dense clouds which block out young stars in the visible spectrum. Most of what we know about star formation, we know because of observations at longer wavelengths.