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by 8jy89hui 1438 days ago
If our habitable temperature was cooler or hotter, we would use different materials to best reflect that environment. I’m not so sure it is luck
3 comments

There is a bit of luck in even having any viable materials that work at the required temperature to choose from.

For example, humanity hasn't been able to find a single appropriate material for a superconductor at room temperature/atmospheric pressure despite significant research, but a civilization living below 100 K has a myriad of options to choose from. Superconductors are high technology to us, but if your planet is cold enough then superconducting niobium wire would be a boring household item like copper wire is for us.

Hum... We inhabit that temperature exactly because it allows for a wide range of chemical reactions in a controlled fashion.

The Anthropic Principle is not luck.

We are lucky that those interesting things are possible. We are also unlucky that many interesting things are not possible. But given that they are possible, it was almost inevitable that most of them would be possible around us.

It's also not an absolute. We don't actually know how common life is in environments significantly different from ours, so the part about "wide range of chemical reactions" is just our conjecture.
Niobium superconducts at 9.3K, so that would be a pretty cold household!
It’s lucky in the northern hemisphere there is an easily recognizable star pointing almost exactly at the North Pole, which makes navigation much easier.

It’s lucky some available material worked the right way to make a transistor.

It’s lucky some person smart enough to make that work got to work on that.

History is full of lucky coincidences like that. How many Einsteins have died out in the jungle, without access to our scientific knowledge or a way to add to it? For most of history and partly still today, being a scientist wasn’t possible for just about anyone, you had to be from the right family. It’s all about luck.

So let's just use those that work up to 400K :)