[ExI] Double-Earth (Was: kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets)

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
Subject: Re: [ExI] Double-Earth (Was: kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike
planets)

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 07:23:28AM -0800, spike wrote:

> ...  Perhaps the remarkable thing here is 
> that with all the ice on this planet, there are no known (to me) life 
> forms that use it in its solid phase.  One would think there would be 
> a snow eater

>...There is no life in solid phase (yet) since it relies on passive
transport.
It also uses diffusion and brownian noise to drive machinery in solvent
phase. Notice it uses 2d solvents (lipid bilayer) as well 3d solvents, more
complicated systems (host-guest complexes) and it also does active
transport, within the solvated paradigm.

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Ja, what I meant was some plant that could land on dirty snow, create some
kind of root or mineral transport system which would let it germinate on the
surface of the snow, use sunlight to send the snow thru the phase change
into liquid water, reach down some number of cm to the phosphorus sources
below in the soil, transport that and the other necessary minerals to and
from the leaves, then have a plant which germinated on the snowy surface to
create a plant which started life by getting water from melting snow.  The
bottleneck might be in collecting enough energy from small leaves to get the
80 cal/gram needed to change the phase of the snow.

spike