Timeline for Concerning Earth plants on an alien world, how much "sunlight" would "too much" and "too little" be compared to our sunlight?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
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| Oct 20, 2021 at 17:31 | comment | added | jamesqf | @JohnWDailey: I'm not sure why you think that's relevant to anything I wrote. What matters to the plants is not the light intensity outside the atmosphere, but how much reaches the leaves after it passes through air, clouds, and maybe several layers of forest canopy. Then there's angle: what's relevant is intensity parallel to incoming rays. Intensity at Mars' equator is about the same as at Fairbanks, Alaska, and plants grow perfectly well there. Given a bit of greenhouse effect, Earth at Mars' distance would be habitable. | |
| Oct 20, 2021 at 9:02 | comment | added | TitaniumTurtle | @JohnWDailey Mars' primary issue isn't a lack of sun light, but ironically a bit too much. Lacking a molten core and thus a magnetosphere, the atmosphere doesn't have enough of a magnetic field to hold a dense enough atmosphere because solar wind basically blows it away. The thin atmosphere further lacks an ozone layer, which basically leaves the entirety of the Martian surface permanently bathed in radiation. Even if something can survive on the sparse nutrients and atmosphere, which I'm sure something could, the little sun that Mars does see would burn away any substantial life form. | |
| Oct 19, 2021 at 21:56 | comment | added | JohnWDailey | Mars is in the habitable zone, yet has only 40% as much sunlight. That proves that light in a habitable zone cannot realistically be uniform. | |
| Oct 19, 2021 at 18:54 | history | answered | jamesqf | CC BY-SA 4.0 |