Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 3192507" data-attributes="member: 3649">Very small amounts of life, and most of those are supported by life that is dependent on the sun. Ecologists are not just jerking your chain when they refer to life as a web, with everything tied to everything else. Geothermal energy is only going to come through in a very few select places and might be able to keep a few survivors together for a little while. About the only thing you'll have living might be tube worms down around the geothermal vents, until those vents close. And we know very little about them. Some trace but nessesary element of their diet might come from decaying life from the higher ocean; without that, they die as well.But that's not the issue. Sunlight is. You cannot power photosynthesis without sunlight, and that's what powers the entire life cycle of the planet. When the ocean phytoplankton die, the rest of the planet follows not so long afterwards. If we're assuming this is a fairly sudden event, evolution won't even have a chance to try out some variants that might work.The sun has other less-noticed effects. Just as an example, a lot of animals rely on the level ambient light to tell them when to breed (most animals are not always in heat like we are; they don't just breed anytime they please). Take that away, and they simply stop breeding. Same thing with seasons, heat levels, amounts of rain: all these and more serve as breeding triggers to something. No sun, no seasons, no weather, no breeding. Mass extinctions follow, taking the predators with them.Knock out any of the large pillars that support life and the entire house of cards follows over the next hundred years or so. About the only thing that could possibly save life on a planet without a sun would be magic, or the conversion to forms of life that are not as we know it.</blockquote>

Verification