The Biodiversification Resistor: Ramifications for Life on Extreme Exoworlds
The Biodiversification Resistor: Ramifications for Life on Extreme Exoworlds

Summary/Abstract: It is now well known that life can live in environments previously deemed too extreme; however, what constitutes extreme environments concerning life? It has been observed that there are environments with high species diversity and environments with low species diversity. Thus, the latter are the ones that have been deemed extreme. The relations between decreasing biodiversity and increasing extremity have been studied in this work, and several proportionality relations, and their ramifications for potentially inhabited exoworlds, have been clarified. Thus, it has been found that a biodiversification resistor exists as a boundary condition for life and that a biovelocity resistor exists as well as a boundary condition on inhabited worlds. Thus, the fact that the environment is extreme implies a lower biodiversity and a lower biodiversity entails a greater vulnerability to potential environmental changes, external as well as internal. This means that life in an extreme world does more poorly than in a relaxed world. Thus statistically, the number of inhabited extreme worlds will decrease compared to inhabited relaxed worlds. Based on the abstracted proportionality relations, a classification of worlds has been put forward: Population I worlds (no life), Population II worlds (biodiversity poor), and Population III worlds (biodiversity rich), where the proportionality relations allow to evaluate how the conditions for potential life elsewhere must be, and thus provides an essential tool for astrobiology.

• Details
• Contents