How Likely Is The Sun To Rise?

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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Branching a discussion from Is a coin more likely to flip tails if it has already flipped heads a bunch?:

I don’t know how to answer this question. I lean towards ‘no’, but I think it’s a complex question (and as a result not very useful for clarifying the basics of probability, thus the new thread)

The reason I lean towards no is that, though the sun is expected to burn out eventually, it’s not expected to do so suddenly. I’m unaware of any theory that suggests that could happen, or any observation of a star like our sun suddenly extinguishing. So while I think there’s good reason to believe it will one day be extinguished, it doesn’t seem like the likelihood of it extinguishing increases every day. Kind of like how even though we know it will eventually be Christmas, it’s not getting increasingly likely that tomorrow is Christmas.

I could be wrong on a number of points of solar physics, and if solar extinction works differently my answer may be different.

More likely than the sun not rising because it went out is that sun won’t rise because we’re wrong about the nature of reality, e.g. we are mad, or we live in a simulation, or we’ve been lied to by a vast conspiracy of astrophysicists. To be clear, I don’t think any of these is particularly likely (though madness is the obvious favorite), I just think it’s very, very, very unlikely that the sun will go out tomorrow if modern science’s best guess of how stars and planets work approximates how stars and planets actually work.

And I’m not sure how the likelihood of those changes over time. The odds of a conspiracy seem to decrease as our lives increase, since it’s harder to fool someone for longer. The odds of madness seems to decrease for a similar reason, though if we’re mad I’m not sure we can trust reasoning at all. The odds of it being a simulation seem to increase, because new technologies continue to expand what might be possible with technology – when the greatest computer on earth was the Antikythera mechanism, it would have been hard to convince anyone that we could be constructs inside a computer, and rightfully so.

I don’t know how to net that out, because it’s very hard to put numbers to such improbable and bizarre hypotheses (particularly when they threaten to undermine the very bases of our reasoning about them). It seems possible that the total of these outside possibilities is either increasing or decreasing, and in any case it is a rounding error against the already vanishingly small possibility that the sun won’t rise tomorrow.

So I think it’s hard to give a firm answer, I lean ‘no’ but I have a lot of uncertainty about it. I think it’s very hard to put an exact estimate on the probability of the sun rising tomorrow that is better justified than ~1.

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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Is a coin more likely to flip tails if it has already flipped heads a bunch?

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This thread is pertaining to my question, which you attempt to answer in this thread.

My answer is that the more days that go by the less likely it is for the sun to rise the next day.

The second sunrise was the most likely and the next day was less likely, and every day that goes by it is less likely that the earth/sun relationship will continue to exist. It has been well over 1 billion days, so tomorrow will be much less likely that the earth sun relationship will still exist. Eventually as the likelihood of sunrises gets lower and lower it will reach a point that the likelihood is so low that something happens and the earth-sun relationship ceases to exist, hence no more sunrises.

The sun simply can not continue to rise, and every day that the sun rises means one day closer to death, hence less likely each day that goes by.

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I understand why you asked, but for all the reasons I lay out in the OP of this thread, it isn’t a simple question of probability, and so my answer to it isn’t relevant to that thread.

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I didn’t say anything about probability. I am talking about the concept that as something occurs more and more that the likelihood of it occurring the NEXT time is less.

So it is wrong to think that it is MORE LIKELY that the sun will rise tomorrow since it has risen for the past 1 billion days.

The likelihood decreases that the sun will rise tomorrow the more days that it rose in the past.

More days in the past doesn’t equate to more likely tomorrow. It is DECREASING as more sunrises occur.

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You have missed many factors, in determining that equation though, haven’t you…

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No. Just like if you start eating a piece of bread, the more you eat the less that remains. It does not matter HOW MUCH remains, the concept is that it gets less the more you eat.

Claiming the sun is more likely to rise because it has risen for many days is like saying the more bread I eat the more that remains. Nonsense.

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…like I said:

You have missed many factors, in determining that equation though, haven’t you…

I didn’t say that^ without reason… :roll_eyes:

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Y’all keep thinking I’m playing, wont’cha. :unamused:

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I guess if you’re talking about the fact that the physical universe is not going to last forever, you have a point.

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Same with you waking up the next day, or your car starting the next day, or how likely it is your TV will turn on tomorrow…

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Or for that matter, in the next moment.

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Right. Likelihood decreases as time elapses whether it’s more heads in a row or the sun rising.

The most likely day for the sun to rise tomorrow was day 1, which was 50% it will and 50% it won’t rise tomorrow. Every day that the sun rose after that was less and less so that 50% was CONSTANTLY decreasing from 50% approaching 0% as more days elapsed.

Which means that if the 50% that it will rise was decreasing, then the chance that it won’t rise was increasing. Eventually you end up somewhere at 10% it will and 90% it won’t rise tomorrow.

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0% likely. The sun doesn’t “rise”. The earth rotates causing the sun to move into view or out of view.

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Stop trolling.

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Ah I knew it. So you have been trolling this entire time.

Thanks for the confirmation. Now back to your regularly scheduled nonsense :arrow_right:

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You’re the troll because you know what a sunrise is.

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…and motordaddy is infact, a motormammy… aren’t you, dear?

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Nope. I’m in fact a Daddy.

But Motor Daddy is an Army term for the person in charge of the Motorpool, which is the Motor Sergeant, nicknamed Motor Daddy.

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…and your arguments in the ‘coin’ thread are as inconsistent as you are.

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Like what?