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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (52472)	12/15/2005 10:51:13 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 361718

One of the major items that Drake missed on his evaluation of the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ was the influence of the moon. The moon is gravitationally locked to the earth ( that's why the same side always faces us). This is because the moon is much closer than would be expected if the earth-moon settled from the same dust cloud the way most planet-moon systems are thought to settle. The net result is that the earth moon orbit is like two balls connected by a string and swung. They remain in a disk-like orbit. Otherwise the separate balls would over time spin in various chaotic directions the way a pitcher's changeup ball does. The probability of life on a planet then also has to multiplied by the probability of that planet being the remains of a collision of planets that was big enough to merge, but small enough not to disintigrate into an asteroid belt. There are many other factors which could tend to make life a fairly rare phenomina, and intelligent life even rarer. However, it is a certainty that discussions on the prospects only take place on those planets, however rare, where intelligent life did evolve. TP