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#PennedPossibilities 857 — Does your universe have any autumnal traditions?
Seasons arise from axial parallelism, and as I'm writing space opera there are many worlds in it, some with and some without axial parallelism. (The latter tend to be problematic for human settlement: many parts of our native biosphere depend on it.)
@cstross When it comes to what life requires as compared to what it tolerates, I'm not so sure. There are plenty of nutrients that the human body requires from external sources, but that often seems to be "it's freely available in the environment, why support a metabolic pathway to make it?". And then there's the ultimate requirement/tolerance substance, namely oxygen
@bellinghman Yep, and it's possible we only *have* free oxygen because we have an upper mantle subduction cycle which we only have because we've got that humongous, anomalous moon, which is also why we have tides—
@cstross Evolution has relied on so many contingencies
You know, I miss Jack Cohen
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