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Astronomers & cosmologists like to play games where they try to sketch out how a tidally-locked world might, just might, be inhabitable. I tend to think it's ba
by jerf 7y ago
Astronomers & cosmologists like to play games where they try to sketch out how a tidally-locked world might, just might, be inhabitable. I tend to think it's balancing on a pretty high-dimensional knife's edge on cosmological time scales; there's all sorts of directions that various resources can fall out of the habitable zone and not be able to come back.
For a terrestrial example of the sort of thing I mean, see things like https://www.astrobio.net/biosphere/earths-breathable-atmosphere-tied-plate-tectonics/; https://www.astrobio.net/biosphere/earths-breathable-atmosph... it is thought that a lot of resources vital to life on Earth would have left the biosphere before life could even get going if Earth, or before the biosphere could progress very far, were not tectonically active. Trying to put together a habitable eyeball-planet seems like it has that problem to the tenth power to me.