[ExI] Gaian Bottleneck

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of Brian Manning Delaney
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2016 7:34 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Gaian Bottleneck

El 2016-02-01 a las 15:26, spike escribió:

>> Ja.  Tide locked planets would have one small advantage for emerging 
> lifeforms however: there would be a twilight ring at the transition 
> between the day side and the night side...

>...Spike, are you saying that the expansiveness of the real estate per se
-- in the sense of its non-ring-like nature -- is important for the
development of life (or intelligent life)? --- Brian

_______________________________________________

Hard to say Brian, but my notion goes thus.  You and I are lucky enough to
have evolved on a planet which is almost entirely Goldilocks conditions
nearly everywhere.  Water can exist in liquid form everywhere here, a
good-sized planet with a lot of oceans and the goldiest of Goldilocks
conditions.

A tidelocked planet would probably have these conditions somewhere in a ring
in the twilight zone (lower case t, lower case z).  But that might be narrow
(your speculation welcome) and might require some direct starlight and some
shelter, which would further complicate or restrict the formation of life.

Now consider the old days: nothing but single cells things floating around,
skerjillions of them.  Somewhere somehow, two of these started working
together.  There you go, our greatest of great grandparents.  My notion is
that of all these skerjillions of unicellular lifeforms, a pair of them
somewhere did something extremely unlikely: they figured out how to work
together, and you know the rest, the dinosaurs came, got too big and fat so
they turned to oil, then Arabs came along and bought Mercedes Benzes, etc.  

The tidelocked worlds would have a narrow Goldilocks ring with so much less
of the simple lifeforms, it is easy to imagine it just stays right there at
that stage until the local star uses up the last of its hydrogen and goes
red supergiant.

spike