[Space] Gliese 581

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Fred, assuming that it is possible that the atmosphere of the newly discovered planet isn't like that of Venus, what sort of life do you think might develop there?
Or is any talk of life on the planet just wishful thinking, IYO?

All other things being equal I believe that the red-dominant spectrum of the star gives you less energy for photosythesis. That's just less input at the base of the life cycle.

Then you add in that the only proposal for adequately cooling the dayside involves perpetual hurricane force winds.

Firstly we need this everlasting storm to not make much in the way of clouds and exacerbate our cool sunlight problem.

This seems a little unlikely to me but the longest I ever spent under hurricane force winds was about 48 hours. We had darkness at high noon while that happened though.

If there was little water in the atmosphere this problem might not be as bad as it would be on Earth but low moisture makes other things worse.

Then you add in that there might be little topsoil. The winds would probably blow it away before it could accumulate.

For an optimum everything-works-as-well-as-possible scenario I'm getting slow-growing rock-hugging lichen-like plants as the main probability for any sort of life based on an Earth-like photosynthesis cycle.

Technically, the majority of Earth's biomass might be anaerobic bacteria living in porous rocks down to a surprising depth. You could have that here but it's kind of a dead end for rpg scenarios. There are probably long-term issues for the planet's carbon cycle too. Solvable but not ignorable IMHO.

Maybe this planet could have a thriving ecology that was radically different from anything Earth-like. All I can suggest is that you bring lots of handwavium and do like Doc Smith did and don't go into much detail about the basis of the ecology on Trenco. :)