United States: Science fiction stories often imagine aliens living on desert planets, like in “Dune” and “Star Wars,” where dangerous creatures like sandworms live. But recent NASA research suggests that we might not find life on these desert worlds after all.
Arrakis the desolate arid world where the major setting of “Dune” is located, hosts thousands of dangerous sandworms in the desert. Yet even on planets in so called habitable zones around stars — as scientists believe extra-terrestrial species must have evolved because it is not too hot or too cold for a planet to support at least some liquid water — life cannot exist.
As reported by the space.com, that’s because of the violent ways in which these planets lose the majority of its water, as scientists who conducted research for the crew reported at the American Geophysical Union’s 2024 annual conference (Although, the paper about the conclusions, made by the crew, is not published yet).
From the scientific team of NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory project that is geared towards searching for any signs of life in other sun systems, posited that planets deemed habitable may require water on their surface for the traditional reasons, but for several other more unusual reasons as well.
For instance, the team found out that water has a unique function of moderating a planet’s temperature from rising or falling. The viable life on Earth requires its climate to be moderate most of the time which means if the existent life on other planets is comparable with the life on our planet that’s how it would be.
“These planets may be quite barren, like these dry deserts you see with a lot less water than our Earth has oceans, maybe even considerably less than one planet Earth has in oceans they could be quite widespread throughout the universe,” said Haskelle Trigue White-Gianella, a University of Washington Ph.D. student, who conducted the computer simulations that traced the evolution of such desert planets at the talk.
We discovered that a country needs to use a certain amount of water for the climate for it to be stable … Furthermore, if a planet is in the habitable zone but has relatively little water, it essentially becomes uninhabitable.”