xanther
Legendary Pubber
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2018
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I believe it really is one's call how common or rare one want's to make terran habitable worlds in one's game.
Certainly would not take Book 6 as any sort of simulator, back then we had even observed a single exoplanet and you would have been laughed at if suggested a system like Trappist-1 or if you proposed a Jupiter sized planet in Mercury's orbit (read recently hot Jupiters like this account for 1% of detected exoplanets so far)
Heck the other day just read about a possible planet detected around a trinary system. A few days before that one around a white dwarf. The before that about a hot gas giant that rains iron. Then an article about how an terran habitable planet can exist around a neutron star (and not the Larry Niven gas torus idea, which I understand her checked with an astrophysicist for plausibility). Let alone that rogue planets (those without a star) could well have life...especially given their estimated numbers. More things in heaven and hell.
I love real world data, but like to keep in mind it's limitations. Earth size planets are still very hard to detect, planets that orbit "far" from their star (1 AU can be far) are still hard to detect. There is a strong bias to detect large planets close to their star in pretty every technique, except direct imaging but that still favors large planets. Recent missions like TESS are changing that, however caveat with TESS it uses the transit method so it relies on the orbital plane be in line with our observations. A long way to say, what we see is skewed by the selection bias inherent in our technological limitations and not every system is amenable to our detections techniques (e.g. transit method really relies on a happenstance position of the orbital plane relative to us).
All that being said, it is like every where we look there are multi-planet systems, around stars and in orbits we never imagined. It really was not a lack of our physics but a lack of our imaginations and appreciation of all the things that are possible and apparently common. Given that what we do see is likely just the tip of the iceberg, and the giant planet close in ice berg, it could well be earth sized planets are also in abundance and all over the place in all sorts of orbits.
All that being said, I think it a jewel of a planet indeed, that has just the right orbital distance/temperature, axial tilt, gravity, atmosphere and atmospheric pressure. One could have a planet of same temperature, tilt and gravity but 3 atm. or 0.8 atm, habitable yes (let's assume the partial pressure of O2 is OK
), comfortable maybe not. Even upping gravity to 1.1 g could be unpleasant. Let me digress, as I am wont to do, what has been getting me in sci fi lately is not that there are so many humanoid aliens that are perfectly content with our atmospheric mix, but they also seem fine with our gravity, pressure, temperature, humidity, light levels, "day" cycles, etc.. In these multispecies crews shouldn't there be a whole bunch were the "human" settings are a bit hot, a bit cold, a bit damp, a bit dry, gravity too much, or not enough, the air too thin, and the air too thick, the sleep cycle too short, the sleep cycle too long. Wouldn't the whole non-human crew be continually grumpy and uncomfortable when out of quarters?
