Talk:2202: Earth-Like Exoplanet

I'm assuming this is in reference to exoplanet K2-18b? 108.162.241.52 18:30, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

I was thinking the same thing. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 18:41, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Note that K2-18b was actually "discovered" way back in 2015 by the Kepler Space Observatory. The recent news was the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of the planet. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 04:36, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

I'm seeing the actual comic alt-text as "Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life—or used to, anyway, before the fire." Note the tab before "actually" and the odd characters after "life". But that's not what it has on this site. Is that difference intentional?172.68.70.70 19:07, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

I've noticed a similar difference on other pages. For me, there are glitches in the title text on many XKCD pages, but here they appear as I assume they should. DanTheTransManWithoutAPlan (talk) 19:23, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

AFAIS the XKCD-webserver claims incorrectly that the charset of the page is windows-1252. --DaB. (talk) 19:49, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Yes. If you change your browser's encoding to Unicode, it shows up properly -- though the tab before "actually" is still there. --Aaron of Mpls (talk) 00:24, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

A non-tidally-locked planet (like ours) needs to be firmly in a habitable zone (like ours) to allow the daily and seasonal cycles (like ours) to not send every square foot of the planet well outside any 'reasonable' range of conditions so that there's no possible adaptation possible by life (like ours).

OTOH, a tidally-locked planet probably sustains a belt of habitability upon it somewhere between the most sun-scorched face-centre and the most astronomy(-if-not-astronomer)-friendly area of the farside, and it may even let the lifeforms survive more extreme stellar 'seasons' than a swirling planet could, so long as that belt doesn't move so far as to 'lift off' either face, if there exist effective migration paths available for the mobile life and hibernation/aestivation states and hidey-holes for those that are forced/choose to be immobile.

There's the argument about a constant hurricane-force surface wind passing between hot and cold hemispheres, but that assumes a reverse upper flow in atmospheric cells (or a phase-cycle of liquid?) which would promote and reinforce elements of turbulance that might interact with 'surface' features (perhaps subsurface, in waterworld environment) to create areas that are lucuna in the chaos, 'islands' of calm.

Though with many theories of abiogenesis and evolution requiring some form of cycling conditions to filter out the unadaptable and promote the adaptable, so the actual 'interesting' zones are probably in habitable-edges surrounding the habital spots of constancy within the habitable belt upon the habitable-zone planet.

It's a bit moot how all this would work, though, given our knowledge based upon post-facto knowledge of a sample of one life-bearing planet. Hard to know how little or much Earth is typical compared with everyone else. At least until my people come back to rescue me, when I'll have to remember to catch up on the basic classes I've obviously missed. 162.158.34.210 22:01, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

I thought "between the swinging blades" was just a metaphor - 162.158.214.148 05:41, 14 September 2019 (UTC)