Space whales

Space whales are hypotetical organisms that live in space without the help of any technology. There is currently no plan to add space whales to the game, but if someome can prove that such organisms can exist, they may be added to the game.

There a few ways organisms can end up in space.


 * 1) Abiogenesis of life can happen in space. Since there isn't enough pressure to keep water liquid in space, the warm little pond or hydrothermal wents that are associated with the emergence of life can't exist in space, making this unlikely.
 * 2) Microbes are known to float in the air, and can even end up in space, which is called radiopanspermia. Radiation could be an issue for them, there are microscopic organisms that can survive in space, but they do this only for a limited amount of time by entering dormancy. And since they are microscopic, they wouldn't be able to navigate the vast distances associated with space and collect resourced needed for growing and multiplying.
 * 3) Geysers like those in Europe and Enceladus can send some organisms to space. But a back of the envelope calculation showed that geysers in planets with atmospheres can't send large organisms into space.
 * 4) An organism can evolve a rocket and go to space. Calculations to show this can be done haven't been done.
 * 5) A tree can evolve to be as high as the geocentric orbit, allowing the species that climb it to enter space. It hasn't been shown why and how that can happen.
 * 6) If a moon aproaches its planet more than the roche limit, it would be torn apart and turn into a ring. It was suggested that organisms on an inhabited moon can adapt to the conditions of space while the moon is being destroyed, but no detailed explanation was given for this.
 * 7) If two planets of the same size orbit each other, they can get extremely close to each other without being torn apart, about 2.5 times their radius. They would be tidally locked to each other and they can share an atmosphere or an ocean. The organisms can use the high speed the planets rotate around each other to more easily enter an orbit around their baryocenter with one of the methods described above. Moreover, the sides of the planets not facing each other can lack an atmosphere, allowing organisms to experience (and adapt to) space conditions by just walking beyond the icebergs. However, such binary planets would be quite rare in the universe.

The controversy: The concept was seen as something that is very unlikely, just like the underwater civilisations. Unlike that topic, this discussion wasn't banned in the community forums, but a slow mode was enabled in the thread in order to prevent gish galloping. Following this, the all the users (except 50gens and BurgeonBlas) made a private thread to discuss the concept without the slowdown.