While this paper acknowledges at the beginning the need to pump entropy out of a system faster than the local system is injecting it (criterion three, but that is my own summary, and a bit different than they phrased it), and they claim they cover it, I don't actually see how they cover it. The only thing they discuss is the gradient between the inner star and outer star, which does indeed involve an energy flow, but the relevant question is whether you can get a gradient between the "inside" and the "outside" of the organism and pump enough entropy out of it to make up for what is being generated inside.
I am deeply skeptical of any such claim for the inside of a star because of the sheer amount of entropy constantly being jammed in by the environment. A star entity would be made of relatively normal matter (compared to some other things), even mediated through magnetic fields, and would be working on not entirely dissimilar time constraints from us, so it is difficult to see how that could work.
(Contrast Robert Forward's story about critters living on old, relatively quiescent neutron stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg While if I had to bet, I'd bet reality still makes that impossible, at least the Cheela creatures built of degenerate matter would be working with reactions that themselves run much more quickly than our normal matter reactions do, so one can imagine that even though their environment is pumping more entropy in than our environment does per second, perhaps something could run more quickly and pump it out again at rates conventional matter could not. A star creature is in an environment that could run at perhaps modest, single-digit multiples "faster" than us, but is getting enormous multiples more entropy pumped in. I don't see the ratio working out favorably.)
Dragon’s Egg is my favorite hard SF novel. I remember attending a session with Robert Forward at an early 1980s World Science Fiction Convention and was amazed at how much detail science and math Forward put into his books.
Agreed, great book. Anyone who enjoys thinking about the extremes of possible life might also enjoy Blindsight by Peter Watts. It blew my mind about the nature of thought and consciousness in the same way dragon's egg blew my mind about the nature of time and consciousness.
(The extended universe of this story is the Fifthist Church, which is usually written as a kind of hippie Scientology and has a pretty different feel.)
Just finished rereading that for the first time in ages. I don’t agree with a lot of its opinion on consciousness, but still great read. I was surprised at how in line with Dark Forest theory it is.
> I am deeply skeptical of any such claim for the inside of a star because of the sheer amount of entropy constantly being jammed in by the environment. A star entity would be made of relatively normal matter (compared to some other things), even mediated through magnetic fields, and would be working on not entirely dissimilar time constraints from us, so it is difficult to see how that could work.
I am not a physicist but I think this is a moot point when the entire basis of the paper is string theory and requires the existence of hypothetical monopole particles to encode information like DNA. This is all sounds like wild speculation built on top of the most speculative theoretical physics still active in academia.
Though, again, how to keep any "quasiparticle" coherent/retaining the necessary properites in the middle of a star is, to put it charitably, an open question.
Could you help me understand what it means to "pump entropy out of a system"?
I asked ChatGPT and it claims "It is generally not possible to "pump" entropy out of a system in the same way that it can be added to a system. This is because the second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of a closed system will always tend to increase over time."
ChatGPT is wrong here because in order to "pump" entropy out of a system this system must not be closed! So to ask it, you must insist the system isn't closed.
And, specifically, living organisms can't be closed systems, because their existence depend on spending energy to decrease their internal entropy, increasing the entropy of the external environment in the process, in order to keep their own entropy low enough to still function without random breakage we would expect from an aging system.
And we all know that entropy always wins in the end, and we always break if we are old enough, so this is a sisyphean task; but we still do it all day every day, because we are afraid to die.
"Pumping entropy out of a system" to me means keeping the system more orderly. To drive such processes, you have to increase entropy elsewhere, which is also known as using energy.
Beats me. It was pretty obvious to me early on when asking about any field I know well that it had no understanding and would happily blurt out a wrong, but plausible sounding answer. So I haven't even tried to ask it abkut stuff I don't understand. Because how would I even tell if the answer made sense? Seems like an easy way to get the completely wrong idea.
People love DeepL translations for the same reason, that they sound convincing, even though they are often completely wrong. Even before that people were (and still are) trusting the infocards that Google puts in search results based on arbitrary snippets it extracted from the webpage, because those snippets are presented as authoritative even though they're often out of context or completely wrong.
People are used to AI being clunky, unfocused, ungrammatical text, ala markov chain bots from the 2000s. So conversely this kind of verbose, coherent, well-written text appears to be knowledgeable and correct.
I can only hope that deepfakes and such become popular enough that people learn to be less trusting of what they find on the internet.
> People love DeepL translations for the same reason, that they sound convincing, even though they are often completely wrong.
Could you show examples?
I'm using DeepL to translate things form and to languages that I know very well, usually to double check or get additional inspiration for wording. I've never experienced anything that was completely wrong. The translations are most of the time almost perfect.
The examples I know of all involve Japanese light novels translated to English. For example https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/1405658562378952705 (The tweet author is someone I know, not me.) Other cases are fan TLs of novels that I've read which were done through DeepL, so I can't link them.
If you define advertisements as quality information google definitely wins out. I wouldn’t use either to learn something unless you’re interested in buying what their advertisers and their SEO results are selling.
To some degree, I'm probably at least curious about what SEOs are selling. If it's art, it probably popular and I'll want to know what it is, and if it's tech, people with money for SEO are often also the ones with money for innovation.
I don't usually buy stuff in ads(Actually, I rarely buy anything nonessential without thinking for a week about it), but Google's results usually are interesting, if a bit creepy and echo chambery.
I don't just use Google to learn things and accept the first results, but I do use it as a starting point.
That’s how I use chatGBT to learn. It’s rarely precisely correct but it’s answers are often basically right or direct me to a lot of concepts to investigate further. For instance I want to build a TEC based CO2 freezing chamber but need a low temperature TEC. I asked it about what TEC materials operate at low temperature. It gave me 10 different TEC semiconductors with operating temperatures, which were sometimes right. I then used Kagi (seriously, google?) to find literature. Using the two together - one to get a rough outline of the domain explained in simple and concise language and the other to retrieve information.
IR systems lack the bootstrapping phase - unless you know precisely what you want to learn you’ll end up in SEO hell sifting through loosely related garbage produced by algorithms to include as many relevant terms but zero insightful knowledge. I think for learning chatGPT is great for bootstrapping, then I turn to IR to refine and get accurate information.
I disagree, I think it's a case of the question being asked imprecisely. When you ask the right question chatGPT gives you a very insightful and accurate answer.
Human :
By what means might entropy be pumped out of one part of a system and into another part?
ChatGPT:
There are several ways that entropy can be transferred from one part of a system to another:
Heat transfer: Entropy can be transferred from a hotter body to a cooler body through heat conduction, convection, or radiation.
Work: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings when work is done on the system.
Mass transfer: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the transfer of matter.
Information transfer: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the transfer of information.
Chemical reactions: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through chemical reactions, either through the production of heat or through the transfer of matter.
Electrical currents: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through electrical currents.
Magnetic fields: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the generation of magnetic fields.
Gravitational fields: Entropy can be transferred from a system to its surroundings through the generation of gravitational fields.
If the person knew how to ask the question "correctly", they wouldn't need to ask.
They asked about systems, not closed systems. ChatGPT just regurgitated the 2nd law, which is just plain wrong no matter how you slice it. Any physicist asked this question would explain the distinction.
They gave you all the information you needed to ask the next question. It specified “in a closed system,” which meant it made an assumption of the closed system and told you. An observant reader would ask then “and what about an open system?” Or if they’re not that sophisticated, “what about a non-closed system?”
You’ve not talked to many theoretical physicists I see. I’ve not noticed they’re usually that good at explaining things, especially to lay people. They tend to be very good at talking with people at the same level or more advanced, usually in a mathematical form. They tend to be pretty bad at imitating a human.
Yeah, if you understand the field or are observant enough, you can tell the answer is fishy. And if you don't, you can't tell.
So what, anyone who gets a wrong idea from ChatGPT is just unsophisticated and we should ignore it? Why are you so incredibly set on invalidating any criticism of ChatGPT?
You don't see a problem with advertising this LLM as something it isn't? Lots of people seem willing to take ChatGPT completely at face value now, and walk away having learned a bunch of nonsense. And lots of them are smart people, they've just been duped by the hype into thinking LLMs can do things they fundamentally can't.
Oh I think it should be improved for sure. I just think this is a bad example. I think most of the fact checking can be done using any modern information retrieval system and you can build algorithms that will regenerate answers until they’re factually correct, or use the IR to hint the answer to correctness. We also have very powerful semantic inference engines and other tools that complement LLM output. I think judging the possibilities by the beta is simplistic, and folks are unfairly down on the achievement by picking nits.
In the context of this question, system has a specific technical meaning though. This is a very technical question so chatGPT might be forgiven for assuming the technical meaning.
So what is ChatGPT supposed to be useful for if people need to understand what the answer is in order to ask the "correct" question? Clearly the person didn't pick up on this closed/non-closed distinction which is why they ended up asking on a forum instead of reformulating.
I think GPT just saw "entropy" and "system" and predicted 2nd law. Which is the sort of low effort response you might get if you ask random non-experts on the internet.
> So what is ChatGPT supposed to be useful for if people need to understand what the answer is in order to ask the "correct" question?
Personally I think there's still a lot of value in mere rephrasing, recontextualizing, perspective shifting, and occasional insightful connection that ChatGPT can do even if it's all using information you already ostensibly know.
As it is often said that one never learns a topic more deeply than when they teach it to others, ChatGPT can serve as the ultimate "rubber duck" coworker for any subject. I'm not sure what we can do about users not using critical thinking, or expecting the machine to do that part for them. There are plenty of non-AI sources of misinformation that can readily be taken uncritically too, though, so it's not necessarily a new problem.
No, rubber ducks are still the ultimate rubber ducks, because they don't talk back with industrial grade overconfident bullshit that misleads and confuses you.
Is there a body of evidence that suggests people get more misled and confused after using things like ChatGPT? It seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but my own experience doesn't necessarily support it. I've used the language model at character.ai for a bit and have found it to be clarifying in a sense. When the model spits out some overconfident misinformation, it's a great opportunity to argue with the bot about it in ways one could never argue with another person - certainly not a stranger, at least.
Perhaps I've been confused and misled so badly I don't realize it, so all I can really say is I think it's premature to assume people will be any more misled or confused by technologies like ChatGPT when all they have to do now is get on the internet or flip on a TV to be personally targeted with misleading and confusing information already. I think there's very real potential for the technology to give people a lever against misinformation if it helps them understand and explore their own thoughts/thought processes.
I guess to me, fundamentally, it's a question of who's the one with agency over using it, and to what end. I'd be much more comfortable once we can fit models like this on home computers and worry less about them suddenly trying to sell us sponsored products or convince us of some ideology because their creator was paid to do so.
Write a python function to compute the idiotsecant.
Sure! Here is a function that computes the idiotsecant of a number x:
def idiotsecant(x):
return 1/x
This function returns the reciprocal of x, which is also known as the reciprocal function or the multiplicative inverse of x. The reciprocal of a number x is defined as 1 divided by x.
For example, if we call the function with an argument of 2, it will return 0.5, because 1/2 is equal to 0.5.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.
Wouldn't the star itself be the closed system? Any lifeforms within it are free to reduce their own entropy so long as they increase entropy within the system.
It's a bit of a colloquialism, I think, but the idea is, all of your biological processes are constantly generating entropy.It is constantly tending toward a system in equilibrium, as physical systems do, but you are essentially made out of non-equilibrium systems. You need the water to be here, but not there. Your nervous system is based on electrical gradients that, left to their own devices, will normalize. Every cell has an electric potential gradient it maintains (google "cell proton gradient"). All of these things and thousands more are constantly breaking down and require energy to maintain. Basically, imagine the difference between a recently dead body that just attained ambient temperature and a living one. Characterizing all those differences would be more than the work of a lifetime.
A super abstract, but physically valid, way of expressing that is that your body is constantly "generating entropy" and it needs to consume energy to fight it. "Pumping out that entropy" is what the body is doing when it takes in energy and uses it to maintain all those gradients.
Life in general may not use organic chemistry, or chemistry at all, but the advantage of this level of abstraction is that any life form (in this universe) will have to do something to "pump out the entropy". It is essentially by definition a deviation from the equilibrium state around it, and it will require energy to maintain.
The point I am making here is that there must be some ability to pump out the entropy faster than it is being generated, or pushed in to the system. Otherwise those gradients and variations from equilibrium will be erased. Inside a sun, there is so much heat energy being pressed in to the system that it is challenging to imagine how any conceivable structure could push it back out again.
This boils down to the observation that "Holy cow, the sun is, like, REALLY HOT!", but, you know, wrapped up in a different formalism that allows us to get past "But what if, like, there's something that could deal with that?". You see this online, the challenge that someone needs to prove that there's no way to build something that could live in the sun. If you don't have thermodynamics as a tool, this isn't even necessarily unreasonable. But thermodynamics gives us a principled way to turn around and say "Any such system would have to have this and that and the other property, and it's really hard to see how plasma and magnetic fields in such a violent environment could have that." It's so not-close that it's not really plausible.
ChatGPT may be referring to the general conceptual space/idea that you can't just build a machine to "reverse entropy" trivially. The most common example of this is that you can't just build an anti-microwave, that remotely cools things by shooting radiation at it in some easy manner. It is sooooo much easier to add entropy than remove it; that is definitely true. In fact, it's kinda a key element of my point here. But you can pump entropy out of a system, in some ways, with some machines, in some manners; since you are literally such a machine yourself, you are an existence proof of that.
I think there might be fundamental tradeoffs at play. An information processing system acting in a cold local environment will have the ability to do far more complex computations with more reliability (thus, in a way, be much more likely to exhibit complex internal behavior) but will also be limited in how much work it can perform onto the outside, thus how much it can recognizably output from the computation. While the opposite will be true at higher temperatures.
> Life can be thought out as a dynamical hy- percycle (DNA encodes proteins, proteins help DNA to self- replicate, DNA encodes proteins, etc.) that can survive indefi- nitely as long as free energy is available for it, and as long as self-replication goes faster than the destruction of information carriers.
Somebody posted something on here awhile back, definitely last 2 years, that suggested a really novel & fun to think about view on “life”, stating that life is a manifold for information through spacetime. DNA must replicate in order to prevent its dissolution into entropy, and life therefore exists because nature threw together the right random shape for the building blocks of self-preserving space-time informational manifolds. I’m doubtlessly paraphrasing and summarizing poorly, but my inner hippie was going “whooaaaa mannnnn far out!!”
Not at the moment, but it’s a good suggestion. I should start putting something together like that. Feel free to email me though if you want to talk about books. You can find my email at the link in my profile.
Could you engineer a system, with a huge computer and fusion reactor to look like a star? Consider that all life would be digital at this point. If we take energy production and computation to the limit with huge scale, it might start to resemble a star. It would also be a perfect hiding place and defensive structure against aggressors. Rather than trying to eliminate your heat signature, you max it and hide in plain sight.
Let me introduce you to Matrioshka Brains [1]. It's not quite what you suggest. In this case it's one (or more) successive shells around a star to use the solar output into computing power. The amount of computing power you could get from this is simply unimaginable.
This structure would have similar properties (and honestly isn't really that different to) a Dyson Swarm. Assuming thermodynamics holds the only way to get rid of heat ultimately is to radiate it away into space. At any temperature you're likely to get to this is going to be infrared light. The wavelength of radiated heat is solely determined by temperature.
So could you instead radiate away visible light? Technically, yes. Kind of. One way is simply to use a lot less of the energy. Now could you get the temperature up to where this has a visible light signature instead? You're talking about thousands of degrees. What material could get that hot? It's a big problem.
Also, such a material will still have telltale signs. Spectroscopic signature would reveal it wasn't the expected hydrogen-helium mix.
Another possibility is a truly giant star. Stars can get incredibly large. IIRC the largest known star (UY Scuti) if it were placed at the Sun's position would be large enough to swallow Jupiter.
The thing is. These supergiants/hypergiants don't have a hostile boundary or surface in the same way a cloud from a distance looks solid. It would be hot but really diffuse. Technically it would be possible to build within the star's atmosphere and dump the heat.
That's a great idea for a scifi novel right there. I wonder if you could steer the star around by shining more of the radiation out of one end, or focus it all into a beam of death
There's a great concept that I found out about reading Schlock Mercenary (a sci-fi webcomic), about using a gas giant as an interstellar spaceship [1]. It probably originates elsewhere, but it was nicely explained there. You build a "candle" (huge tube) that is inserted into the gas giant on one side, then ignite the gases inside it (iirc the comic uses fusion reactors on both ends, and an intake in the center of the candle). Both ends of the candle are open, "inner" end counteracts the gas giant's gravity to keep the candle from sinking into the core, the other end produces thrust. You put your payload on moons that orbit around the gas giant, and steer by moving the candle. The "thrust end" of the candle also doubles as a light and heat source for the moons, replacing the sun while in interstellar space. There are... some risks involved into the whole operation.
In addition to Kardashev scale, there should be a scale for how much power can a civilization project on an enemy at once. More advanced civilization should be able to project more power on similar scale as Kardashev. I.e. being able to project one star's power on an enemy would be a type 2 civilization.
If you take a star and throw it in a black hole you'll last much longer than any star ever would. The mass to energy conversion efficiency can get close to the theoretical maximum possible.
> One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.
> All this, surely, was good, yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world’s delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.
Reminds me of a thought I had after learning that it takes about 100,000 years for a photon to escape from the interior of a star. That is a long time, and the photons might be useful in conveying information throughout the structure of a star, in the same way that an electron propagates information through a brain. Extrapolate from there...
The paper hedges its bets on a rather lower bar for the definition of life.
By which definition, prions would likely be considered to be alive. But I think the consensus is that prions aren't alive, and are just self-replicating proteins.
This reminds me of a paper [1] where they find that... "In the redshift range 100<(1+z)<137, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273-373K (0-100 degrees Celsius), allowing early rocky planets (if any existed) to have liquid water chemistry on their surface and be habitable, irrespective of their distance from a star."
I read somewhere (if someone remember it, please tell) a short history about life in neutron stars. It would be incredible fast due to the abundance of energy, with the evolution from 'stone age' to computer age happening in milliseconds.
Due to being in a deep gravitational well, such life and life inside a star are forever isolated from us. Unless they discover a way to use solar flares, in fact, perhaps solar flares are their way to escape the surface of the sun.
Dragon's Egg [1] and Starquake [2] by Robert L. Forward are both hard sci-fi novels about fast-moving life on a neutron star. I enjoyed both of them, especially the xenobiology and xenoarcheology.
Flux [1] by Stephen Baxter is also about the inhabitants of a neutron star. Hard sci-fi, but maybe not quite as Hard as Dragon's Egg so far as I recall.
There's also enormous time dilation, they would appear to be moving very very slowly from our POV.
It would be magical if both those phenomenon exactly counter each other (I have not run any numbers, but my instinct tells me time dilation will win out).
I think a neutron star would have time dilation below 2x. Would be interesting at our time scale, but on the order of magnitude we're discussing of the increased chemical speed i think it would just be noise.
There is a big difference between infinite and very high gravity. Neutron stars have only about 50% time dilation on the surface, as the surface is at about 50% their Schwarzschild radius.
The monopoles and cosmic strings kinda ruin this. But there totally might be life in the star cores made of plasma magnetohydrodynamic interactions, in fact I'd be surprised if it weren't common. And the lifeforms would be completely isolated from outside universe, by the turbulent nature of outer star layers, by the enormous gravity well and the comparatively absolute cold and vacuum of empty universe. None of the linked sci-fi stories have such life as subject (at best The Truth but that one has a creature that can exist on Earth long enough to be perceived instead of violently dissolving into loose cooling gas in microseconds), probably because it's very hard to make it interact with human characters, but it's the simplest form I can think of.
Buried in the first assumption is the question of structure.
Instead of chemistry, which I will refer to only by analogy, let's imagine Tinkertoys, the old wooden ones.
0) A tinkertoy ball with zero holes can connect to nothing. It is a monad. It is boring. You can build nothing with it. This is rather like a noble gas. (Hahah yes you can build a cage around Xenon very clever thank you move along)
1) A tinkertoy ball with one hole can connect to another tinkertoy ball. If you have only these, well, you can form pairs with them, but nothing beyond the pairs. This looks like diatomic molecules. You can jumble them about but you cannot build a larger structure with them. Another dead end.
2) A tinkertoy ball with two holes can connect with two other tinkertoy balls with the same number of holes. If this is all you have you can build a long chain, as long as you like. Were it not so ruthlessly hungry for other electrons, ozone, which is to say three oxygen atoms, is a very flawed example. Sulfur, the next Group VI element, is better ... you can make chains of six to thirty sulfurs rather easily.
Let me pause here. This is really a fundamental question: can you do anything interesting with this chain of sulfur atoms? Are there fascinating Van der Waals self-interactions? Can you effectively "knot" these chains, forming a higher level structure? This is the absolute bleeding edge.
I propose that you need to hit ...
3) Tinkertoy balls with three or more holes. At that point you can form branching structures or a flat plane, and so on. This would be your nitrogens and phosphorus-analogues.
My general thought is that, whether you have whole atoms with valence electrons, or wads of nuclei in a neutron star, whatever "chemistry" or equivalent is going on, you need three holes, or the ability to form three connections to other components, to create structure more than a humble chain, and that these connections must be relatively stable. If there is a chemistry analogue occurring on or in a neutron star, or some kind of strange plasma, or really anything, you must have a minimum number of connections to form a large enough structure to be more than just isolated bits of matter.
I will allow that the "chain" model of just two connections might lead to something, but I wouldn't lay money on it.
Granted, I'm a fan of Forward (and his son's work as well), but my guess is that the nucleonic matter alone wouldn't support those kind or number of connections, or "bonds," as fun as it is o think about.
Chains of amino acids can form interesting proteins by 3d folding a 1d chain, so I wouldn't give up on your two hole tinker toys so quickly. Perhaps 2 hole node structures will never dominate in an environment with 3 hole nodes, but in an environment with only 2 hole nodes, 2 holes are the only game in town. I think we're going to find life everywhere, and everywhere life will have constructed itself from the best tools available - the most efficient physics and chemistry in that environment, but that the minimal requirements for a toolkit that life can use to fight against entropy will be much lower that the decadent luxury of the CHONPS toolkit we enjoy.
Right, but those amino acid chains are rich with self-interactions because the subunits each have so many different elements within them, like those big cheaters carbon and nitrogen. You can get all kinds of exciting stuff with that.
Were they only chains of sulfurs, could we get much out of it? Knots, possibly, I could make room for a knot in the chain of sulfur leading to something interesting, or a vague Van der Waals or other second, even third-order effect, but it's really on the knife edge of possibility.
Of course your right, but what if absolute efficiency doesn't matter all, what if the only thing that matters is relative efficiency? If knots and folds of two bonded atoms could create units with different properties : hydrophobic, and hydrophilic (or the equivalent properties to some other non aquatic medium), forming corkscrews, forming sheets, forming cross chain links - then perhaps it doesn't matter how convoluted the solutions are, perhaps all that matters is whether it is relatively efficient compared to other competing solutions. What I think makes this more than just a hypothetical to ponder is that perhaps this is fundamental to understanding the origins of life. Perhaps early life was complex without being sophisticated, having terribly inefficient metabolic pathways, a chaos of reactions in which only a bare sliver of energy was directed towards useful activities, perhaps the activities of those early cells unfolded slowly over thousands of years and it didn't matter because there was no other life to compete with.
The year is 2024. After years of gravity assists from the inner planets Solar Probe+, er, Parker Solar Probe, slips into a planned series extremely close passes only 9 solar radii from the sun itself. The plan is for it to become the first human object to directly interact with the magnetic fields and plasma of the outer corona.
This would be the story of the operators of the the Advanced Technology, er, Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in the day of and years after their unexpected discovery of persistent seemingly life-like patterns of kilometer scale plasma and magnetic fields seemingly triggered below and overlapping in time with the Solar Probe+ perihelion.
The life-like patterns of bright spots are found in the cool molecular layer of the chromosphere below the transition region. The temperature in this layer is so low that many diatomic molecules exist at equilibrium. This is where the gradient of thermal pressure to magnetic pressure is greatest and charged particles undergo "anomalous acceleration" previously unexplained by any detailed mechanism.
http://erewhon.superkuh.com/Plasma-beta-depending-on-the-hei... [The beta of a plasma, symbolized by β, is the ratio of the plasma pressure (p = number of particles*Boltzmann's constant*temperature) to the magnetic pressure (p_mag = magnetic field²/2*magnetic permeability).]
The story would be about the process of science and discovery seen through the eyes of the DKIST and other observatory technicians [not: about the personal and political fallout experienced by the scientists and technicians of DKIST as the various postdocs in the labs compete compete to try to figure out if the patterns really are life and if so what can be learned from them]. As part of this it is also about the science involved in imaging and reconstructing ~50km long bright spots just above the surface of the brightest object in the solar system. After lots of exposition about zeeman splitting, the hanle effect, poynting vectors, crossing number and other topological considerations the shape and nature of the aliens as actual life would be clearer.
The bright points come into being as a result of tension in field lines causing magnetic reconnection creating discrete plasmoids with a definable magnetic helicity handedness. In order to keep stable the plasmoids have to shed magnetic helicity to the solar wind to keep their internal magnetic dynamo from stopping. This requires utilizing opposite helicity magnetic fields that rise from the solar dynamo to the the photosphere below.
As more resources are allocated and data is collected it is found that the plasmoid lifeforms are composed of dynamic arrangements of many plasmoids stuck together in patterns that "eat" opposite sign helicity magnetic flux tubes emerging from active regions. [This process would conclude with shedding single soliton waves via magnetosonic soliton conversion into shock waves that themselves break down into trains of soliton waves that propagate out into the solar wind? Soliton formation requires a balance between convection and dispersion.] The origin of nanoflares, unexplained km scale coherent radio emissions, non-thermal broadening of spectral lines in the transition region, the gamma ray excess and 40 GeV dip, and why the corona is hotter then the surface are finally explained.
Along with this human accomplishment and understanding of the outer sun references should be occasionally made to the uncertainty about the the processes occuring above the tachocline but below the photosphere. Even more mysterious is the dynamo itself in the core known only through inferences made from "G" vibrational modes of the star discovered through doppler measurements of the photosphere surface.
I am deeply skeptical of any such claim for the inside of a star because of the sheer amount of entropy constantly being jammed in by the environment. A star entity would be made of relatively normal matter (compared to some other things), even mediated through magnetic fields, and would be working on not entirely dissimilar time constraints from us, so it is difficult to see how that could work.
(Contrast Robert Forward's story about critters living on old, relatively quiescent neutron stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg While if I had to bet, I'd bet reality still makes that impossible, at least the Cheela creatures built of degenerate matter would be working with reactions that themselves run much more quickly than our normal matter reactions do, so one can imagine that even though their environment is pumping more entropy in than our environment does per second, perhaps something could run more quickly and pump it out again at rates conventional matter could not. A star creature is in an environment that could run at perhaps modest, single-digit multiples "faster" than us, but is getting enormous multiples more entropy pumped in. I don't see the ratio working out favorably.)