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How would multicellular organisms evolve in a microgravity ocean?

Worldbuilding Asked on December 28, 2021

How would living organisms develop/evolve in a very-low g ocean environment?

The environment would be a small radioactive core surrounded by a small mass of water, less than 100 km in diameter, in the center of the L4 or L5 Lagrangian point between a very large planet and a large moon.

The body of water would be held together by surface tension, the forces of the Lagrangian point, and a thin outer layer of ice.

The water is kept liquid from the heat of the radioactive core.

The moon provides sufficient amounts of radioactive material, water, nitrogen and carbon in a similar fashion to how Enceladus provides the material of Saturn’s E Ring, such that the body of water keeps a stable amount of water, the core receives new radioactive material as the old one decays, and life has the materials to develop.

The large planet has a strong magnetic field protecting the body of water.

How could/would solid or liquid multicellular life forms develop in a body of water without substantial gravity?

2 Answers

Life growing from the cracks.

The stuff to build meat will be scarce in these waters. As it is in open ocean, but maybe scarcer than that - at least in open ocean there is the possibility of blown dust, or elements from the sea floor welling up. On this lonely droplet there is none of that.

Perhaps you could have this water in a cloud of space carbon and nitrogen; tholins raining down onto the planet surface. I could imagine they might accumulate on the ice, as might be the case for Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. https://astronomy.com/news/2017/01/gunk-enceladus-surface

enceladuse https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/enceladus_cracks.html

When a crack forms in the ice, that material becomes available to the life beneath. It is an upside-down deep smoker. Instead of rich materials ejected from the deep earth and made available to the sea dwellers, rich materials will fall thru the ice cracks and become available.

I could imagine a tangle of life hanging down from these cracks as they open or close. Primary producers work chemistry on the tholins as they thaw. Heterotrophs feed on the primary producers. Spores or planktonic forms are released into the bottomless ocean, to drift until they encounter another lifegiving rift in the surface.

Answered by Willk on December 28, 2021

On one side for a micro organism floating in water, gravity is almost non existent. Being made mostly out water, they simply float in the liquid and are carried around by currents.

On the other hands the lack of gravity will greatly influence the distribution of nutrient: while on Earth any dropping falls to the bottom sooner or later, in microgravity everything, from a rotting corpse to the feces of any other organism would stay in place.

This would mean that transport of nutrients would be greatly limited by only intermolecular diffusion.

As a reference, stagnating waters on Earth are often abiotic or very poorly livable, due to this very issue.

Answered by L.Dutch on December 28, 2021

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