Earth being unusually dry for a habitable world would be a Fermi Paradox soft landing

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As noted in a Nextbigfuture article in April, the Earth is an unusually dry for a habitable planet.

David Brin points out that this is the safest and best “soft landing” to the Fermi Paradox. That the universe is filled with life-rich water worlds, but our Earth, skating the inner edge of the Sun’s CHZ or Goldilocks Zone, has unusually more land surface. Hence hands-and-fire races like us are the rare thing. When we build starships, we’ll find lots of other folks out there… with flippers and such. Interesting to talk to, but not competitors. Of course there’s another aspect to us skating the inner edge of the Sun’s CHZ or Goldilocks Zone. It explains why Earth has to shed heat so efficiently and even a little bit of greenhouse gas excess can be lethal.

Bayesian evidence for the prevalence of waterworlds

It appears feasible that the Earth has an unusually deep ocean basin. The gravitational potential associated with its surface fluctuations is much higher than any other body in the Solar system. In turn, this may suggest that the Earth has unusually strong tectonic activity, and consequentially, an abnormally strong magnetic field. This exemplifies how selection effects can easily be transferred to correlated variables.

Earth’s land configuration may be optimized to ensure that the majority of the available area is habitable, thereby maximizing its fecundity. The Earth has a drier composition than over 97 per cent of water-bearing planets.