SRAPO

SRAPO¹: A Pursuit in Exobiology
[Above: The Carina  constellation]

Have you ever looked up at the myriad of stars sprinkled across the sky on a clear and beautiful warm summer night…and wondered? Did you wonder if perhaps a creature living on a planet around one of those far away lights was looking at his night sky too?
…and perhaps just at the moment you were looking at his home star, he was looking across the gulf of space at our sun…and you were both wondering about one another.
Did you wonder what the alien might look like?
Did it ever cross your mind to wonder what he’d see when he stopped staring into the night sky, and again looked around at his own familiar surroundings?
What if you could look through his eyes?

Imagine its late in the afternoon, almost dusk and you’re whisked away, then set down safely, but elsewhere on planet Earth. Without knowing your location, maybe you were set in any of these environments (see photographs below: Sahara desert; Death Valley; the Kalahari desert; the Eurasian Steppes;  US prairie; prairie-woodland;  woodlands of the eastern USA; the Pantanal Swamp; tropical Kauai, Hawaiian;  forests of central Oregon; the Tundra of northern Canada; the dry valleys of Antarctica, island chains, continent…
You’re standing there in one of those environments…its twilight, the colors have largely faded into grays. You look about, while feeling the temperature and humidity; you can  identify the general type of environment you have been set in. You can tell whether the vegetation is tall or short, thick or spindly, dense or thinly spread about, there may be sounds and smells carried in the air. Kicking at the ground you can just see whether the soil is sandy, composed of pebbles, whether its rocky, covered by some type of  ‘organic’ matter. The things you sense and see about you are the way they are for a reason.

If you were not on Earth, but instead on a habitable planet about one of those distant stars, the things about you would still be the way they are, for a reason.
Large habitable planets are generally quite wet, small ones are much drier; very hot or dry environments are likely to have water or temperature as the limiting factors for intelligent life; high relative gravity favors short and squat forms; high relative ultra violet ‘sunlight’ favors protective pigmentation; increasing planetary axial inclination favors life form mobility and hibernation…

SRAPO is a construct, a filtering lens that removes the unreasonable and focuses on the probable.
[Diamond symbol notation ♦  = Posted in 4dtraveler blog]

♦  Page & Post
♦  Exploring the Construct
♦  SRAPO Introduction
♦  Chapter 1: Water
♦  Chapter 2: Average Planetary Surface Temperature
♦  Chapter 3: Climatic factors
♦ Chapter 4: Atmospheric Circulation
♦ Chapter 5: Atmospheric Retention
♦ Chapter 6: Stellar Parameters
♦ Chapter 7: The Morphology of Intelligent Life
♦ Chapter 8: Into A New World
♦ Chapter 9: Data Correlation
♦ Chapter 10: Templates
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Note 1: SRAPO is an acronym for Stellar Radii and Planetary Orbits)