From this article. The first thing that I noticed was that the earth is on the “hot” end of the scale, meaning that we could be farther from the sun and still have life, but not be much closer. This seems counter-intuitive to me, because we have plenty of people living on the equator, but not near the poles (without a lot of equipment, anyway.) I would think that if the earth were closer to the sun then people would just tend to live closer to the poles. I suppose one interesting drawback of this would be that there would be an uninhabital barrier between the north and south hemispheres, making it very difficult for species to mingle.
There were factors mentioned in the article, but I didn’t understand it. Can someone explain this in laymans terms?
I put this in GD because IDK if there is a factual answer to something like this, but mainly because I welcome tangental discussion of this subject.
It’s not about whether life is more adapted to colder temperatures or climate, but rather due to particular atmospheric conditions, with a certain zone from their star, which would enable a planet to hold on to enough solar energy to keep water liquid somewhere on its surface, within some sort of stable climate (greenhouse gases like CO2, evaporated water in the atmosphere, and what-have-you…)
The Sun has warmed throughout its history; we used to be nearer the cold part of the zone. Eventually, we will be outside it and barring some massive technological intervention by whatever comes after us Earth will become much like Venus.