Except, of course, the bit where I talk about apex predators and all...Zixinus wrote:There seems to be a more-or-less common error: you all assume that the creature lives on its own entirely, as opposed to living in a ecosystem that already grows plenty of life on its own.
That said, the reason for this is that we're speculating about life in a vacuum, clinging to asteroids. The most fundamental problem (as thermal and baric problems are avoidable) is that nutrients would be extremely scarce. Scarcity gets worse the larger the ecosystem gets, and more complex life forms are less robust to extreme conditions, of which there are no less than four in this case. (Extreme high and low temperature, zero or near-zero pressure, and dehydration.) Sure we could speculate about several different kinds of archaea, but they're still going to be largely archaea all the same. We don't speculate about complex ecosystems (by which I mean more than a bunch of monocells, perhaps of multiple species with some limited interactions) because the scenario is set up such that it's effing hard to get anything working let alone complex life.
