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If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the ni
by b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context of following the path of least resistance in any given domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's a giant metal tower 300 feet in the air a quarter mile down the road that appears to be a much better path to ground.
- loudmax 1y agoThere is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding weird little niches at the edge of sustainability. Waterless deserts should present an enormous opportunity for something to fill, but it hasn't happened.
- bookofjoe 1y agoExcept in science fiction (so far); see, for example, "Dragon's Egg," Robert L. Forward's superb 1980 novel of life on a neutron star with surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg