Gliese 581-G (Just for fun)

[Slylok]

This also means that its always daytime here. I'd think the life on the planet would evolve alot differently than it does here. id imagine rings of different species of plants and animals around the steady temperatures and climates. How would intelligent beings here measure time? How did their skill of navigation evolve without being able to see stars in a night's sky? What does the food chain look like in the different areas? This is really fun to think about.

the concept looks great. do you plan on taking it any further? does it have any moons?

Edit: Actually since the sun is always in one place they would just need one star to navigate.

[Podcreature]

Those are helpful questions Slylok! Haha, ohright, the sun! It would be very interesting indeed, to think that if there's a highly evolved species on this planet, stars would be an uncommon sight to them, until they started sending up satellites or traveling to the twilight areas on their planet. Colonizing the far-side would be much like building a moon-base, so it certainly wouldn't be possible until they'd reached some kind of industrial era.

Good point about the moon... tidal flux would be a good way to stimulate an ocean current and nudge primitive sea critters onto land. That might also break up the clouds a bit so it's not such an even blanket in the coastal areas. I think a moon would be necessary for a lot of reasons. It would also make the sky a little more interesting, because as you pointed out, it doesn't really change much.

Most ecosystems are dependent on the sun, so it would probably be much the same here. Something one might consider is how foggy it must be by the water most of the time. Again, that's why the tide might be handy, to stir up the sea and clouds. Bring some rain inland.

Despite the red dwarf star being dimmer, being so close and having it be day all the time would still be a great environment for photosynthesis, I would assume. I thought about the native life having chloroplasts in their cells instead of mitochondria, or a combination of similar creatures, so that animal life is somewhat sun-dependent. I pictured a reptilian-looking race, with scales that keep in water, to be the resident sentients.

Time-measurement is an interesting question. Their year would only be about two months long. These revolutions would be the crux of any calendar.

As for what I plan to do with this, it's just a sci-fi comic project I'm planning to put out mostly for exercise on another site. I just get so engrossed looking for explanations and end up spending a lot of time on settings lol. So I do plan to develop it a little more at least... The next step is to actually pick an existing red dwarf that's main sequence but old enough not to put out too many flares. Eye-earths have enemic magnetospheres, since they don't rotate. This makes them vulnerable to solar wind that could blow off their atmosphere over billions of years. I actually imagine that life from another planet could have "recently" seeded this world however, so that might explain the presence of a lot of water.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

[Raptori]

Edit: Actually since the sun is always in one place they would just need one star to navigate.

That comment reminded me of an interesting piece of information I read in Jared Diamond's book Collapse which could be relevant to this world. He spent a lot of time on an island in the Pacific called Tikopia which is particularly isolated, with next to no contact with the outside world even today. The island they live on is so small that they can see the ocean from almost any spot, and that they're all intimately familiar with every square meter of the place. They denote direction in relation to the ocean - for example in one instance that Diamond witnessed himself, one islander told another that they had some food on the oceanward side of their face!

If the sun is completely stationary in the sky, the inhabitants would be likely to behave in a similar way to this I think!