A deck of cards is actually random, whereas star, planet and solar system formation is constrained by a load of physical laws, mainly gravity. We know little about solar system formation, but sufficient to say it’s not a card deck shuffle, which is pretty much customised to be as random and unpredictable as possible. It’s counterintuitive in a way, that something as mundane as a deck of cards could be mathematically so extreme, while celestial bodies tend towards equilibrium and similar configurations, but it’s true.
By contrast, one of the most important scientific rationales of the enlightenment is the Copernican Principle, which states that humans do not have a privileged position in the universe: where we are is pretty typical. Or, at a large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.
But, in answer to your first question, no. We absolutely do not know this for sure. It’s just pretty solid reasoning.
We know little about solar system formation, but sufficient to say it’s not a card deck shuffle,
Well it’s different in several factors competing in different directions, and it’s not clear to me what the overall aggregate direction is.
The fundamental force of gravity is going to drive a lot of disparate starting points to collapse into similar results.
But in the end, we’re still talking about the probabilistic chances that certain lumpiness in the distribution of mass from supernovas or whatever forms the matter of solar systems, and how each solar system’s spinning disk coalesces into planets with their own elemental composition and orbits and rotations and moons and internal rotation and energy that might make for magnetic fields, plate tectonics, etc.
If the probabilities of those may still have some independence from one another, then even if there are lots of stars like ours and maybe even lots of planets that are earth sized, and lots of planets with the oxygen to make water or carbon to make organic chemistry or the iron to make a magnetic field, we might still recognize that the correlations between these not-fully-independent variables still require stacking probabilities on probabilities at a factorial rate.
While the number of opportunities for those conditions to hit might go up at an exponential rate, if the probabilities are small enough and there are enough necessary factors for life stacking on each other, it’s entirely possible that the exponential expansion of more solar systems than we could fathom is still too small to make for an appreciable probability of the conditions of life.
I don’t know what the probabilities actually are. But I can see how the math of the combinatorics can totally dwarf the math of the vastness of the universe, such that the overall probability remains infinitesimal.
The aggregate direction is always towards highest entropy, which means lowest energy state, stability etc. Planets tend to self organise into harmonic orbits with simple whole number ratios, because that’s the lowest energy state. But the result is that we have a nice, stable solar system where planets have relatively circular orbits with nice spacing. Despite the initial chaos of the formation, it’s very likely that all solar systems collapse into this kind of high entropy, regular stability, and what little observations we can make of other systems have confirmed it.
The point is that it’s not at all random, there are irresistible forces at play which narrow the space of what’s possible into a very small box, cosmologically speaking. Matter organises itself into spheres, then into orbits etc. We don’t see disc shaped planets for example because they’re physically impossible to make using natural processes. And we don’t see planetary collisions because they can only happen at the start, in the chaos of system formation. Then it all settles down into a stable, predictable, harmonically resonating system, as the laws of thermodynamics predict.
A deck of cards is actually random, whereas star, planet and solar system formation is constrained by a load of physical laws, mainly gravity. We know little about solar system formation, but sufficient to say it’s not a card deck shuffle, which is pretty much customised to be as random and unpredictable as possible. It’s counterintuitive in a way, that something as mundane as a deck of cards could be mathematically so extreme, while celestial bodies tend towards equilibrium and similar configurations, but it’s true.
By contrast, one of the most important scientific rationales of the enlightenment is the Copernican Principle, which states that humans do not have a privileged position in the universe: where we are is pretty typical. Or, at a large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.
But, in answer to your first question, no. We absolutely do not know this for sure. It’s just pretty solid reasoning.
Well it’s different in several factors competing in different directions, and it’s not clear to me what the overall aggregate direction is.
The fundamental force of gravity is going to drive a lot of disparate starting points to collapse into similar results.
But in the end, we’re still talking about the probabilistic chances that certain lumpiness in the distribution of mass from supernovas or whatever forms the matter of solar systems, and how each solar system’s spinning disk coalesces into planets with their own elemental composition and orbits and rotations and moons and internal rotation and energy that might make for magnetic fields, plate tectonics, etc.
If the probabilities of those may still have some independence from one another, then even if there are lots of stars like ours and maybe even lots of planets that are earth sized, and lots of planets with the oxygen to make water or carbon to make organic chemistry or the iron to make a magnetic field, we might still recognize that the correlations between these not-fully-independent variables still require stacking probabilities on probabilities at a factorial rate.
While the number of opportunities for those conditions to hit might go up at an exponential rate, if the probabilities are small enough and there are enough necessary factors for life stacking on each other, it’s entirely possible that the exponential expansion of more solar systems than we could fathom is still too small to make for an appreciable probability of the conditions of life.
I don’t know what the probabilities actually are. But I can see how the math of the combinatorics can totally dwarf the math of the vastness of the universe, such that the overall probability remains infinitesimal.
The aggregate direction is always towards highest entropy, which means lowest energy state, stability etc. Planets tend to self organise into harmonic orbits with simple whole number ratios, because that’s the lowest energy state. But the result is that we have a nice, stable solar system where planets have relatively circular orbits with nice spacing. Despite the initial chaos of the formation, it’s very likely that all solar systems collapse into this kind of high entropy, regular stability, and what little observations we can make of other systems have confirmed it.
The point is that it’s not at all random, there are irresistible forces at play which narrow the space of what’s possible into a very small box, cosmologically speaking. Matter organises itself into spheres, then into orbits etc. We don’t see disc shaped planets for example because they’re physically impossible to make using natural processes. And we don’t see planetary collisions because they can only happen at the start, in the chaos of system formation. Then it all settles down into a stable, predictable, harmonically resonating system, as the laws of thermodynamics predict.