Talk:Rare Earth hypothesis

Fact check.
Someone needs to fact check this as the "99% of stars are red dwarves" statistic conflicts with at least two other Wikipedia pages. 'fraid I don't have time or expertise tho.

There appear to be a lot of other facts in here that need checking too, or at least proper qualification of how certain they are. Despite recent advances we still know very little about what it takes for a planet to become Earthlike, stating that there must be this or that condition is probably inappropriate. Bryan 04:55, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * But surely the assumption that a whole series of improbable events are required to create an Earth-like planet is a premise of the Rare Earth hypothesis. Once you qualify this by saying these events are not necessarily so improbable, and may not all be required anyway, then you have created a different hypothesis - something like the Not Quite So Rare Earth hypothesis, perhaps. Having said that, the point that the Rare Earth hypothesis is based on assumptions rather than known facts should probably be stated more clearly in the intro. Gandalf61 20:25, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)

I think it must be mentioned that the planet itself must have oceans in which life will be created. Because life can emerge only in liquids but not in gas (because molecules interact with each other pritty rearly) or hard state (because molecules do not interact at all). Also the planet must have a magnetic field to repel the radiation. See Mars for a good example - it has no magnetic field and the atmosphere and (eventualy) any water is blown off by the solar wind making it a desert planet.

Stellar Flares In Red Dwarfs
The page in the section discussing the problems with red dwarfs, fails to mention the fact that many if not most of them periodically undergo stellar flares, where they emit out hundreds of thousands of times more x-rays than they normally do. Such flares would bake any planet close enough to the star to support life. I don't know if this was mentioned in the book, but it's an additional factor.

Isaac Asimov
Planets for Man is a book by Isaac Asimov and Stephen Dole which is a popularisation of a Rand Corporation report and should probably be added to the Further reading section of this article.

Our current page Planets for Man redirects to the related book by Dole which is a partial title match. Andrewa (talk) 05:21, 26 January 2024 (UTC)