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Whoa… I never thought of that. If complex life were possible on a tide locked planet that held onto its atmosphere you could ride the powerful currents this wou
by api 2y ago
Whoa… I never thought of that. If complex life were possible on a tide locked planet that held onto its atmosphere you could ride the powerful currents this would create at least much of the way to orbit. You’d probably need a rocket to reach orbital velocity and escape but the atmosphere might be almost like your first rocket stage.
Such a civilization would also have endless free energy via solar harnessed from the sun side and continuous prevailing powerful winds. The latter would probably get tapped first. Huge wind turbines would just always spin.
This would be true from their dawning of industry, which would be interesting. No energy wars. I’m sure they’d find something else to fight about if they were aggressive and territorial like us.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoWouldn’t the amount of habitable land mass on a tidal locked planet be rather small? Like the bulk of the planet is either hotter than hells freezer or colder than its hot tub. You’ve got only a fixed ring of land that would be usable. Unless life can survive & thrive in the remainder. Which I’m sure it can and does.
- api 2y agoIt would be quite different from Earth in lots of ways. The most habitable region would probably be the twilight zone but “life will find a way” as Jeff Goldblum famously said. Life would have been evolving for billions of years in that environment before intelligence arose. The temperature gradient might not be as nuts as you’d think. A thick atmosphere would develop powerful prevailing currents that would move heat from the hot side to the cold one, basically a heat engine. It would keep the hot side from being insane and the cold side from being cryogenic. My guess is that the far poles would be extreme but anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 of the non-twilight sides would be potentially habitable by something. If there were large oceans you'd get prevailing currents there that would move heat too. There’d also be a water cycle. Imagine regions of the hot side where it rains a lot. You might have this hot steamy jungle in eternal daylight, meaning 2X the energy available for photosynthesis. There’d probably be critters that would migrate around. I can imagine stuff living on the night side by eating those, scavenging, etc. I wonder if an environment with massive prevailing winds would drive the evolution of wind energy harvesting? Imagine a big tree like thing with big leaves or vanes shaped to flap in the wind and specialized cells that use that mechanical energy to make food and nutrients. Muscles go from sugars to motion. Seems plausible that something could go the other way, especially with billions of years of evolution and a massive amount of energy available that way. If that kind of thing evolved you could have wind powered ecosystems on the night side and solar powered ones on the day side. Lots of possibilities.
- chasil 2y agoWith continental drift, the moving land might regularly undergo sterilization events.
- jamiek88 2y agoTectonics would be very unlikely.