A Gaian Habitable Zone

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple model demonstrating how life influences planetary climate and extends the habitable zone, supporting the Gaia hypothesis through ecological regulation and ensemble effects.

Contribution

It presents a novel abstract model showing how life can regulate climate and expand habitable zones, incorporating concepts like punctuations and entropic Gaia.

Findings

Life can regulate temperature and extend habitable zones.

Ensemble of systems tends to sustain or improve habitability.

Model predicts the size of habitable zones around stars.

Abstract

When searching for inhabited exoplanets, understanding the boundaries of the habitable zone around the parent star is key. If life can strongly influence its global environment, then we would expect the boundaries of the habitable zone to be influenced by the presence of life. Here using a simple abstract model of `tangled-ecology' where life can influence a global parameter, labelled as temperature, we investigate the boundaries of the habitable zone of our model system. As with other models of life-climate interactions, the species act to regulate the temperature. However, the system can also experience `punctuations', where the system's state jumps between different equilibria. Despite this, an ensemble of systems still tends to sustain or even improve conditions for life on average, a feature we call Entropic Gaia. The mechanism behind this is sequential selection with memory which is discussed in detail. With this modelling framework we investigate questions about how Gaia can affect and ultimately extend the habitable zone to what we call the Gaian habitable zone. This generates concrete predictions for the size of the habitable zone around stars, suggests directions for future work on the simulation of exoplanets and provides insight into the Gaian bottleneck hypothesis and the habitability/inhabitance paradox.