By: Aristocratic Jack

Aristocratic Jack — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:16:05 +0000

Certain environmental factors would work together to determine what forms complex organisms would take on an exoplanet or moon. On a high gravity world, the standard animal body plan could call for six limbs rather than the four limbs that are standard on Earth, and or the legs might be thicker (think the legs of elephants and rhinos). Alternatively, the majority of animals could be serpentine, with no legs at all because slithering could be an easier form of locomotive than walking. The high gravity could place a hard limit (or at least a delay) on.how advanced an extraterrestrial race evolving on such a planet could get in terms of technology, like for instance, space travel might be almost impossible for those beings, meaning no satellite communication or any of the other technologies edged on by space exploration.

On a tidally-locked “eyeball earth”, creatures that spend the majority of their time if not all their time on the permanent night side of the planet could have eyes that see in infrared or some other part of the non-visible light spectrum. Even those living on the permanent starlit side of the planet might have partial infrared vision, as habitable tidally locked planets would orbit faintest of red dwarves. Plants on such a world wouldn’t be green, they’d likely be dark purple, dark blue or even black to absorb all the sunlight they can.

And all this is but the beginning.

Comments on: Strange Worlds, Even Stranger Life: How Life Might Evolve on Distant Exoplanets

By: Aristocratic Jack