Some exoplanets statistics
From last week's newsletter: "For this universe's sentient species categorization, I'm following an estimation of the repartition of potentially life-bearing exoplanets. I'm selecting only the planets scientists think could harbor life, which means no crazy void monsters, dry moon creatures or gas giant dragons. It's more like: a lot of fish; since ocean worlds are actually more common than Earth-like planets. However, like on Earth, these creatures would be less technologically evolved than the minority of humanoids from Earth-like planets."
The adventure continues this week with research I've done in order to refine my statistics of rocky exoplanets environments. Of course these are still estimations, from which we can only get a vague idea that approaches the real repartition of exoplanets, but it is still edifying.
First off I discovered a fact that I had previously overlooked: the abundance of methane worlds in our universe. I knew of Titan, and how it has a "hydrologic cycle" of methane, complete with methane clouds, rain, lakes and rivers. And that a chemistry of life based on methane and not water is deemed possible by our scientists. So these worlds would be very similar to Earth, except the biochemistry of life there would be very different. And well, it turns out scientists have calculated a "methane habitable zone", and it would in fact be larger than the regular goldilocks zone where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet.
Here's how it goes: red dwarves are the most common kind of star. They are not the best for water-based life since their habitable zone is so close to the star, which means more detrimental radiations, and the likely possibility for the planet of being tidally locked. However, their methane habitable zone is much larger than that of yellow dwarves like the sun. Red dwarves put out more of their light as infrared, and a methane atmosphere is transparent to this type of radiation, meaning methane worlds could be farther from the red star while retaining an appropriate surface temperature. (That is, 90 degrees Kelvin, or -290 Fahrenheit, or -180 Celsius.)
In other words, methane worlds could be commonplace in our universe. This is something I previously overlooked, thinking water ocean worlds are more commons than "Earth-like" methane worlds, like it is in our solar system. (Over ten ocean worlds, and only Titan representing methane worlds.) However now I'm starting to think I got it wrong, and that the predominant form of life in Heal's universe might not be fish, but creatures with a methane-based biology, that could resemble life as we know it on Earth. To be continued...
How's the book going?
This week I’ve been feeling terrible, hence why this issue of my newsletter is so short. I have been struggling to work on my project. With my condition, I am bound to know good weeks and bad weeks, and this was definitely one of the latter. I don't want to shift the issueing of the newsletter to once every two weeks just because of that though, so, yeah, there might be weeks where I ship less content to you. Here's to hoping that it doesn't happen too often!
Thank you for reading!
Thanks a lot for following me, it means so much. I do my best to keep the project moving forward, so stay tuned next week for more sci-fi oddities, among methane-based life, the prevalence of the insectoid reign, bipedal aliens morphological diversity, diplomatic xenology in a diverse universe, and more. Until next time!
Still really interesting subject,
it can be useful for us, curious readers, to have some of your sources.
Thanks for your work !