First, if you haven’t already, familiarize yourself with this image.. it should be burned into your head for the rest of this paper:
As with any place on this planet, it experiences seasons – they may be minor changes if you’re along the Equator, or up doing research with Santa/Penguins, but they do exist on every square inch on this planet. As with experiencing a season, lets think back to lovely times, as we look outside at leaves falling and thinking about turkey/TV Sales, when springtime was here and summer is approaching. The average temperature is, roughly 10 degrees Celsius, water is pooling but not freezing, plants are growing, wildlife is beginning to emerge. We all know of it, or have seen it in National Geographic.
Now think about where the Astronauts currently are. If they crack a window on the ISS, it’s gonna get pretty bad, pretty quickly inside. The average temperature of the Solar System is minus 270 degrees Celsius. A wee bit chilly for t-shirt and sandals (so help me god if you wear socks… straight to jail…). But it wasn’t always like this. At some point, the Universe was “Suns out guns out” weather.
Luckily, during the time when things were just toasty enough for things like surface water to not be ice, there were a lot of rocky bodies floating around in space. There were stars, there were even planets, but they generally were molten surfaced hellscapes. Earth didn’t exist at this point, nor did the Sun, so sorry conspiracy theorists, this is not how life started here… but what about elsewhere?
When you look back at the history of Earth, life began deep in the oceans around the thermal vents as single celled organisms, that evolved once they got their act together. Could that have happened on these pre-Risa rocks?
Say the average space temperature was a balmy 15 degrees Celsius, and a rock, with some lukewarm water is floating through space. What’s on this soupy rock? Maybe it’s the same things that we know were deep in the oceans of Earth early on. The first elements of life could’ve formed and grown, and they wouldn’t be carbon or silicon lifeforms as we are, but rather, simple organisms, but alive ones that aren’t human, so..
“Planets” as small as Phobos or Deimos, or even smaller, for a few billion years, had a nice surface temperature and potentially had liquid water, and so much more, so what happened? One theory is called the beach theory – appropriately named. Consider the entire universe is the size of a beach ball – hold that beach ball out in front of you. Now, consider that the entire Milky Way galaxy is 0.000008 inches in diameter at this size. We as humans, haven’t gone past our own Moon, so it’s even smaller of a radius.
Space is too big, time is too slow. Expanded on, what happened during that time, is long gone as the base elements that they contained, any any potential simple life, or wildly different life like life made from Ammonia or something, were all blown to smithereens by many many supernovae and other space phenomenon. If key fragments still exist from this time period, they would be somewhere out beyond the edge of the observable universe, if not farther out (meaning, unreachable) thanks to cosmic expansion 🙁
As we can see from this graph, there was a Goldilocks zone when this theory could’ve happened, but it was so short, even Danny De Vito towers over it.
