but could you make a creature capable of surviving and moving in space while reproducing on a planet and flying offworld in early aware stage
Likely not as not only would it require us to consciously program that in as a possibility, but it is also very much unlikely to be possible.
You would first need a method of escaping not only your world’s atmosphere, but it’s gravitational pull beyond. Traditional flight would not be able to even get you out of the atmosphere, even if you were lighter than air itself. Additionally, respiration would become an intense problem as gases become less and less available, as well as exposure to radiation and decompression.
Establishing an orbit around your planet is an absolute requirement for space travel unless you are somehow able to produce thrust so immense that you completely defeat your planet’s gravitational pull; A feat that’s even impossible for modern day spacecraft if I am not mistaken.
If somehow you managed to make it into space with a stable orbit, navigation becomes an immense problem. There is no matter you can use in the void to propel yourself. You can only expel so much matter from yourself until you run out.
If somehow, you managed to evolve some manner of solar sail, you would then need some way to keep yourself fed. There is no matter in the void, so the only potential form of sustenance would perhaps be photosynthesis or maaaaaaybe radiosynthesis. This form of sustenance would leave you with very little expendable energy, and no expendable resources. It’s also worth noting that photosynthesis tends to require respiratory gases, of which you would have none.
If somehow you did find some way to recycle your own gases indefinitely, you would need to sustain yourself for potentially thousands of years as you sail across the void to reach even the edge of your solar system.
Longevity becomes an issue, as even a dormant organism would be chipped away by the harsh conditions of a radiation filled void of nothing. By the time an organism of this kind finally reached another orbital body, it may very well be a fossilized rock.
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But wait, what if they (were in a low gravity planet and there was a mountain that extended above the ozone layer so they evolved radiosynthesis and being a terrarium by holding onto their gasses and could use the mountain as a jumping spot for getting into orbit and from there) could flatulate to go to other stars?
What if panspermia was a single solar system of starving[1] space nomads who launched themselves to the suns they saw at the distance, and a tiny percentage didn’t miss their target, one of them burning on Earth’s atmosphere but nonetheless seeding it with its first life?
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edit: running out of space around its star doesn’t make sense ↩︎
they could use full spectrum photosynthesis and separate water into hydrogen and oxygen and similarly to what @50gens said they could expel it from their rectum and light it to get from planet to planet
That doesn’t allow you to create matter from nothing. Eventually, expelling matter to propel yourself means you run out of matter.
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I’ll link a few threads/posts that are related to this:
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There’s also the question of how these features would evolve a capacity to deal with the effects of the vacuums, radiation, utter cold, and otherwise, inhospitable nature of space. It’s the same reason why there isn’t an animal or organism capable of surviving being submerged in lava; you can adapt to extreme heat, but lava is such a jump in temperature, and there is so little incentive in magma-tolerance, that there is no organism which has taken “the leap”.
Similarly, space is so cold and inhospitable, and so barren of immediate advantages for an organism, that no organism could possibly deal with the entry-barrier of even getting to a point of tolerating the vacuum of space in the first place. Even water bears for all of their resilience can only survive short-term exposure to space (32% of water bears exposed to space died after 10 days), and even then, those who survived only did so because they went dormant.
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Overcrowded planets would produce shit like that.
Edit: @buckly isn’t there already going to be a matter based propulsion system as well as a drag based propulsion system and a space stage all it would require is code that will be needed anyways and there will definitely need to be a Level Of Detail system so it doesn’t end up like hyperrealistic Minecraft and only able to be played on pcs with 3 terabytes of ram and an RTX gpu
Overcrowded planets can’t exist.
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yes they can it’s called there being no selective pressure to be able to die of living so everything lives until it is killed and the predators all getting killed off
What you just said makes no sense. If there are no predators then the ecosystem will still reach an equilibrium.
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not if there are rocks falling from space that increase the amount of resources but not space
creatures will still die so that everything can fit in that space
and likewise, creatures will be born/will adapt to consume more resources
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the reptilians could possibly develop powerful legs and protective parts for their eyes nose and mouth and climb on the mountains and leap to orbit as the gravity of this planet is not yet defined
if we’re talking about space whales being in thrive
yea no thats not gonna happen
what you described can really only happen on an asteroid
and no complex life is gonna rise from that
and playing on an asteroid is definitely not gonna be in thrive
asteroids could most definitely house life if they were in any sort of goldilocks zone asteroids have plenty of gasses and water
among other reasons, asteroids are not large enought to have atmospheres or magnetic fields, so they can’t really harbor life.
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hollow asteroids are a thing and can contain gasses and water
Edit: you REALLY think a 530 KILOMETER asteroid cannot have a magnetosphere or any pockets of fluid or damp gas
still no magnetic fields
i wasn’t done writing it