David Kipping

But it should last for trillions, trillions of years.

There will still be stars in a trillion years from now.

There'll be those red dwarf stars I talked about at the beginning.

So we often say stars are kind of like James Deans of the universe, like the brighter you burn, the shorter your life.

And so these little puny red dwarf stars, they're so pitiful.

They're only about 100 times the mass of Jupiter, 80 times the mass of Jupiter.

So sometimes people call Jupiter like a failed star.

If you make Jupiter...

80 times more massive, it would have burned.

It would have had nuclear fusion.

And those stars, they last for a freaking long time, like trillions of years.

And we know they have planets around them.

We've even found Earth-sized planets at the right distance for liquid water around those stars.

And they appear to be really quite common around those stars.

So the mystery is, you know, if you run the calculation, I was doing this a couple of days ago,

there's about a one in a thousand chance that you would live at this early point in the history of the universe, all things being equal.

If these stars legitimately could have planets around them and biospheres whenever they want throughout their history, then you would be very... It's kind of like reading a book and opening a random page and you happen to land on the first couple of pages of the book.

And that's where we land.

And...

That is very difficult to understand for me.