Yeah, that seems to be the elephant in the room. It's great that planets tidally locked to a red dwarf can block the heat with clouds, and mix the heat around w

Yeah, that seems to be the elephant in the room. It's great that planets tidally locked to a red dwarf can block the heat with clouds, and mix the heat around with their atmosphere and ocean. But if being stuck up against a star means their atmosphere will be stripped off, then there will be neither clouds nor wind to do any good. Then again: Mercury has a dynamo-generated magnetic field, yet has the thinnest atmosphere of all of our planets[1]. Venus does not have a dynamo-generated magnetic field[2], yet has an extremely thick atmosphere. So it's not totally cut and dried. And there's of course the possibility of life in subsurface water. If the atmosphere were stripped, must the planet end up dry? Subsurface oceans can still mix the heat around. It could be underneath crust or ice (though the low atmospheric pressure would probably eliminate any ice near the top, so if it's ice it's probably underneath a crusty layer). Could tidal forces themselves drag enough magma around to generate a magnetic field good enough for shielding? The Earth's magnetic field from ocean tides is 20000 times weaker than the main one[3], but that's based on ions dissolved in water pulled by a relatively weak tidal force. What's a few orders of magnitude between friends? 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/planetary-magnetic-field https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci... 2. Venus has a small induced magnetosphere from solar wind hitting the ionosphere, but that's probably something that would lead to more loss, not less? 3. https://www.sciencealert.com/esa-swarm-satellite-map-ocean-tides-magnetic-field https://www.sciencealert.com/esa-swarm-satellite-map-ocean-t...