Astronomy 2021A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Liquigas, Runaway Greenhouse Effect, Robotic Spacecraft
9 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
No world besides earth has an atmosphere that we could breathe or abundant surface water that we could drink. Without building self-contained environments we have no hope of long-term survival on any other world in our solar system. Yet, when we talk about habitability, we generally mean an environment where any kind of life might survive, not just human life. If we are going to identify potentially habitable worlds in our solar system, we must specify the range of environments that we can consider acceptable for life. Can probably be met by almost any world every star system we"ve studied has at least some amount of all the elements used by life. According to the nebular theory of solar system formation, the planets were built when solid particles condensed from gas in the solar nebula, and these particles then accreted into planetesimals and ultimately into planets, moons, asteroids, and comets.
