"Zarig, the Only Home for Life" up on Fantastic Worlds
Many people are excited by the recent discovery of hundreds of extra-Sharan planets, including numerous small Zarigoid worlds. From at least a couple of these, astronomers have detected the spectrographic signature of liquid water, an essential for life.
This has led certain optimistic fabulists to imagine that these small Zarigoid worlds could be home to life, even sapient life, and perhaps technological civilizations like our own. This is, sadly, improbable, and in this article I will explain why.
As is well known, our homeworld Zarig has a mass of about 25 sextillion tons, which ensures that our crust is stable and avoids the crustal fracturing and motion which afflicts smaller zarigoid worlds over long periods of time, and would in theory prevent the formation of the great shield volcanoes (because the tectonic plates would move relative to them) which build the atmosphere which helps warm our world and is constantly abraded by the wind from our daystar Shara. Why, on such unfortunate planets, the scraping against or even subduction of these plates would cause the very crust to shake: how would a crystal forest ever get to grow? ... and we well know the importance of the crystal forests in our ecosystem, only they are able to reach down through the ocean layers to bring up metals from the ocean floor up into the nitrogen-oxygen-carbon dioxide layer which higher life breathes!
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Read this whole erudite proof of the uniqueness of life on our favored homeworld of Zarig at Fantastic Worlds! Gentlemen, ladies and geladies are all invited to inscribe their own opinions of this essay onto the Crystalnet with their own tentacles!
This has led certain optimistic fabulists to imagine that these small Zarigoid worlds could be home to life, even sapient life, and perhaps technological civilizations like our own. This is, sadly, improbable, and in this article I will explain why.
As is well known, our homeworld Zarig has a mass of about 25 sextillion tons, which ensures that our crust is stable and avoids the crustal fracturing and motion which afflicts smaller zarigoid worlds over long periods of time, and would in theory prevent the formation of the great shield volcanoes (because the tectonic plates would move relative to them) which build the atmosphere which helps warm our world and is constantly abraded by the wind from our daystar Shara. Why, on such unfortunate planets, the scraping against or even subduction of these plates would cause the very crust to shake: how would a crystal forest ever get to grow? ... and we well know the importance of the crystal forests in our ecosystem, only they are able to reach down through the ocean layers to bring up metals from the ocean floor up into the nitrogen-oxygen-carbon dioxide layer which higher life breathes!
....
Read this whole erudite proof of the uniqueness of life on our favored homeworld of Zarig at Fantastic Worlds! Gentlemen, ladies and geladies are all invited to inscribe their own opinions of this essay onto the Crystalnet with their own tentacles!