[ExI] Gaian Bottleneck

[Brian Manning Delaney]

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.  It would be a very limited
> strip of real estate, but it would have mild temperatures there always
> and perhaps liquid water, along with perpetual direct sunlight right
> down on the horizon.
>
> I can imagine life is common in those bio-rings, but it never really
> advances very far.  With all it had going for it, and all this cool real
> estate everywhere, the life on this planet sat around single-celling and
> blue-green algae-ing for 3 billion years before gathering enough
> ambition to join together and do some cool stuff.

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)? Or is it merely that the 
probability of the development of life or intelligent life is a function 
of (among other things) mere quantity of real estate, and a ring has 
much less quantity of real estate than a sphere? The latter makes sense; 
I don't get the former -- i.e., that it would /never/ advance really 
far, as opposed to having lower odds of advancing because of a 
quantitative difference in possibility space.

- Brian