Years ago I thought that if you were elderly and poor, homeless even, then committing a crime in order to go to prison (three squares, a bed, TV and mates to talk to) would be an ideal habitat.

Turns out the Japanese are doing just this. See the comment below (link included).

What else should the elderly be doing? Sharing their homes with oppressed college kids who need to save $ for room & board?

Dangerous work that doesn’t require high physical strength or acuity?

The military. Don’t send youngsters in to a war zone – send old folks?

I keep a running list of the reasons why we should consider Earth as rare in the Universe.

Two additions I’ve recently added are this:

• Theia’s impact delivered more than just iron and nickel to Earth’s core (producing an extra large magnetosphere) but also (probably) delivered additional carbon, nitrogen and sulfur — chemicals which, like oxygen and hydrogen, are volatile and tend to get boiled off during a planet’s accretion phase (forming from the solar system’s proto-disc).

• Tidally locked planets and moons would lose their magnetosphere (the dynamo engine within a iron molten cored planet). Without this magnetic shield solar and cosmic radiation would ravage any life that had arisen on the planet.

The reason I keep this list is that it supports the 2^Nth theory I maintain about how to calculate a Rare Earth.

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The “Two to the N’th” theory is an approximate probability that describes the uniqueness in the Universe of a electromagnetic-energy manipulating species — that is, us. Essentially, all factors that contributed to the existence of humanity can be distilled down to coin flips. Every coin flip = 50% probability. Add up a bunch of coin flips (landing on heads) and you get a probability that represents how unique we are.

For instance: If we assume that one out of every two stars in the Universe/Galaxy is singular not binary (binary star systems are too unstable to support planetary life) that’s coin flip number one (2^1). Of those, if half are the right size (a very conservative estimate) — another coin flip (2^2). If you examine all the factors, turn them into 50% (one flip) or 25% (two flips) or 12.5% (three flips) etc. you end up with a whole load of coin flips or powers of two (2^Nth).

I’ve done the compilation (that is, keeping this growing list) and determined that over 60 is the current number of coin flips that all landed up “heads” which represents how lucky/unique we are in the universe. The probability of flipping 60 coins and ALL OF THEM landing heads — represents the probability of Humanity.

How often would 60 coin flips all land on heads? Well, we know it happened at least once (that US!). But what is 2^60th power?

1,152,921,504,606,846,976

The probability of Humanity is 1 out of 1.1 quintillion. Is that rare? Probably.

I continue to collect these “features” which helped contribute to our existence. I suspect that we’ll get to seventy here some time soon: 2^70 = 1 sextillion.

Here’s a handy approximator:

• 2^10 = ~one thousand
• 2^20 = ~one million
• 2^30 = ~one billion
• 2^40 = ~one trillion
• 2^50 = ~one quadrillion
• 2^60 = ~one quintillion
• 2^70 = ~one sextillion (or one billion trillion)