How Many Earth Like Planets..............

[What's his face]

^To show off? Sometimes civilizations just like to demonstrate their power over nature. That's why China built the monstrous and highly dangerous Three Gorges Dam rather than going the more sensible route of building multiple smaller dams. They wanted a monument to the power of the state.

You mean they didn't build the Three Gorges Dam to provide power to every city on this continent and increase the chances of the host city generating a Great Engineer?

Damn you, Sid Meier....

I heard Abraham Lincoln and Montezuma were pretty pissed.

 

[Myasishchev]

I don't think you could fit four habitable moons around the Jovian, since the closer-in ones would be subject to radiation and tidal stresses that could render them inhospitable. Also, if the moons are big enough to be called Earthlike, then in the tight confines of a Jovian moon system they'd exert significant seismic stresses on one another. Space their orbits far enough apart to avoid that and the outer ones might be too far out to avoid getting perturbed out of orbit by neighboring planets' gravity. Not to mention that the outer moons would be moving several million kilometers in and out from the primary star as they orbited the Jovian, which could keep them from having a stable temperature.

D'oh, those are good points. Although an Earthlike moon would have its own magnetosphere and atmosphere to defend against the Jovian radiation belts, wouldn't it? Then again, the equivalent of the plasma torus that Io travels through might just strip off even a thick Earth atmosphere, as it has apparently done to Io.

I'm not sure that tidal forces would be so severe that it would render one of these Jovian Earths completely uninhabitable--maybe the one in the Ionian position, but Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede are no more geologically active than Earth itself.

The seasonal changes would make it difficult to justify creating the system, however.

Edit: oh, and a big con you might have missed--the primary's gravity probably means a greater incidence of impact events.

Maybe life could evolve to survive such periodic temperature swings, but the conditions could hardly be called Earthlike except in the broadest sense.

Hey, I thought these were vacation homes for cosmic gods or something.

 

[Christopher]

I'm just going by the thread title, which specified Earthlike planets.