The Habitable Zone of Inhabited Planets
Jorge I. Zuluaga (FACom/IF/UdeA), Juan F. Salazar (GIGA/Escuela, Ambiental/UdeA), Pablo Cuartas-Restrepo (FACom/IF/UdeA), German Poveda, (Escuela de Geociencias y Medio Ambiente/UNAL)

TL;DR
This paper proposes that life significantly influences a planet's habitability zone, called the Inhabited Habitable Zone (InHZ), by altering environmental conditions, supported by theoretical, observational, and simulation evidence.
Contribution
It introduces the concept of the InHZ, emphasizing the need to incorporate life-environment interactions into habitability models, which has been underexplored in prior research.
Findings
Life can modify the limits of the habitable zone.
Numerical models show potential shifts in HZ boundaries due to biotic effects.
The paper provides a conceptual framework for future InHZ modeling.
Abstract
In this paper we discuss and illustrate the hypothesis that life substantially alters the state of a planetary environment and therefore, modifies the limits of the HZ as estimated for an uninhabited planet. This hypothesis lead to the introduction of the Habitable Zone for Inhabited planets (hereafter InHZ), defined here as the region where the complex interaction between life and its abiotic environment is able to produce plausible equilibrium states with the necessary physical conditions for the existence and persistence of life itself. We support our hypothesis of an InHZ with three theoretical arguments, multiple evidences coming from observations of the Earth system, several conceptual experiments and illustrative numerical simulations. Conceptually the diference between the InHZ and the Abiotic HZ (AHZ) depends on unique and robust properties of life as an emergent physical…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEarth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
