Their Space Base is outside of DC on I95.
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Makes you wonder what kind of culture that would give rise to if there was advanced life on one of the ideal planets but with them being tidal locked and having greater than hurricane force convection currents it’s unlikely i guess.
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Solar power would be easy in the day, wind power would rule the twilight. Would they have to industrialize to colonize the night?
But perhaps not stuck facing the sun. Mercury is tidally locked, but has a 3:2 resonance: three rotations in two revolutions. If Trappist-1b did that, they’d have a day-night cycle of 3 days, which wouldn’t be too bad.
Flares might be more of a problem in that close, even if it is a small star.
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Lister, Rimmer, Holly, Kryton, Ace, Kockanski, and Holli
the seven planets that orbit Red Dwarf. Is there a skupper-belt?
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In elementary school I read a juvie SF series. Might have been The Adventures of Digby Allen. That was the lead character at least.
In the first adventure the young heroes rescue little humanoids native to Mercury, then thought to be face-locked. They had long fingers, possibly with suckers, for keeping a grip on things given the eternal winds between light and dark side.
At least, I am remembering things that way. It has been at least 40 years since I read the story.
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We’d have to rename the star to Fiji.
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Supposedly the ideal planet would be bathed in a perpetual sunset so i guess you’d need a hell of a lot of solar collectors to be effective, if they developed that far. Also i read that the star might be unstable and dims even more, plunging the ideal planet into a kind of fimbulwinter, maybe for years. Perhaps they hibernate in a regular cycle like the spiders from vernor vinge’s a deepness in the sky. The frustrating thing is we don’t yet know the key ingredients for life to work here let alone elsewhere: take the moon away and can life start? Who knows. Are circadian rhythms essential for life? Who knows.
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Not entirely accurate, but yeah. To the extent we can calibrate or build the instrumentation we may be able to determine some truths about the atmospheres of those worlds, with an eye to things like an unlikely oxidation state of the planet, overall.
James Lovelock did a lot of theorizing here, and I suggest that anyone who wants a good rabbit hole go down that one!
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Oh, i have no doubt about that. I’m scrabbling desperately for the words but i’m trying to say we might know what makes a planet potentially habitable but we don’t know what other conditions will create life since we’ve only got one example to go on. For instance, is it right that we are so far unable to detect the magnetic fields of any exoplanets? That might be a key ingredient.
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it might be, and I don’t know that we will be able to detect that at distance. It’s may be neccesary to deflect some more energetic particles away from planets, as it seems to be here. Or not?
I did not mean to imply ‘habitable’. I meant to imply ‘habitated’. We may be able to see evidence of life at this distance.
If we looked at our system remotely, we could notice one planet with a different chemistry to the others.
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Wouldn’t mars and venus be likely candidates though? I mean if we’re looking at our system with our current tech.
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Not so much. mars and venus rest at entirely different redox states than earth. One has a lot more atmostphere than the other, but chemically they’re kinda dead. If we looked at us with current tech I am not entirely sure what we would find. We could notice the general chemistry from reflections and spectography. We would see that earth is way out balance compared to what it would be sans life actively using energy to convert compounds to other compounds. We don’t have to assume oxygen to notice the redox potential of earth is quite different from the others we have seen, and we know we can attribute that to life processes over billions of years.
This link gets at the instrumentation, although i think it assumes ‘life as we know it’. I know first hand that the folks who professionally look for life on other planets don’t assume it would be identical to what we have here, not at all, but it likely will leave markers of some sort.
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How does that line go?
All biology is chemistry, which is actually physics, which is fundamentally math, and math is all greek to me.
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Ha! of course there is an xkcd for that!
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