What is the purpose of a lifeless planet?

What is the purpose of a lifeless planet?
In the terms of our warlike nature, a staging area perhaps?

originally posted by: woodwardjnr
A nyway there is no purpose to life unless you give it one

How did you get so smart? Words to live by. Thank you

There is no purpose for Mother Nature (The Universe). It is all just happening, life is created and destroyed. A dead planet is just that. Try to detach a bit from your own human perspective and try to look at things from a more "natural" point of view. To the universe, life and death as well as many other human concepts, hold no meaning. It is just the way it is.

a reply to: zazzafrazz

I'm not smart just listened to a lot of alan watts lectures recently and regurgitate the bits that chime true to me. Your the smart cookie round here

originally posted by: metodex
There is no purpose for Mother Nature (The Universe). It is all just happening, life is created and destroyed. A dead planet is just that. Try to detach a bit from your own human perspective and try to look at things from a more "natural" point of view. To the universe, life and death as well as many other human concepts, hold no meaning. It is just the way it is.

life may exist in many forms other than what we perceive to be life,it does not necessarily have to carbon based like we are....as purplemer mentioned earlier planets may be life for all we know.....when you look at the universe as it was recently mapped the whole thing looks like a living cell...we may be a small cell living within a much larger being

a reply to: radkrish
out of habit we confuse life with biology
in a much closer look we can see that's not the case but is a much closer look
maybe lifetimes later

a reply to: purplemer

Yes..it depends on the definition of a living thing. The planet sustains life so its organic as a whole. Everything that exists here on Earth is involved in nurturing itself as well as the planet. Everything helps to maintain balance. But if it doesn't support sentient life what then? And also those gas giants..

a reply to: radkrish

Perhaps there are many others that inhabit what we would call inhospitable planets, only that, they exist in some other kind of realm or division of reality, or a different time-space.

a reply to: radkrish

I think that there are many possible answers to that question, and no one of them alone has the full weight of truth to carry them above the others to a state of consensus grabbing reality.

For example, gas giants, having as they do, such massive density, are capable of attracting and redirecting huge amounts of space debris, and as it happens, if our solar system lacked Jupiter and the rest, it would be a much more dangerous place in which to live, due to the larger numbers of torpedoing space rocks that would be jetting across our planets orbit during a given year. Jupiter you see, attracts these objects, sometimes grabbing them so entirely that they impact with its outer atmosphere, and sometimes giving them a nudge or a pull in such away as to see them flung clear out of the solar system for a few thousand years.

But that is not the only mechanical purpose Jupiter serves. Jupiter also provides certain balancing functions to the solar system as a whole, the movement of other planets around the sun, and so on, and so forth. However, the possibility that Jupiter may be a failed star, as I have heard bandied about over the last ten years, presents us with yet another possible function of Jupiter, that being as a repository for all the exotic material required for fusion, that the Sun either did not need, or could not absorb into its paradigm, during the creation of the solar system.

Obviously, the Sun came before the planet Jupiter, but imagine if all the matter which became Jupiter, had sunk back through the mixture of dust and madness that was the early solar system, and had somehow been absorbed by the sun as reactive matter. We could have ended up with a larger or brighter, or dimmer sun, and that might have lead to totally different circumstances throughout the solar system, and a less habitable situation for our own planet.

The balance of things is what I am referring to here. A world which has no life is not a pointless world, because it may provide a counterweight in its local space, which tunes the orbit of another planet and shepherds it into a habitable orbit, or merely presents itself as a repository for spare resources which, not combined into a single, apparently pointless mass, might have rendered a star system lifeless as part of a larger star, or one which burns at a different rate, or releases totally different wavelengths of light, larger amounts of charged particles or flares...

If but a single part of a cog is too large, or too small, or any side of a cog not correctly weighted, it can throw an entire mechanism out of synch. Well, you could look at these dead, and supposedly pointless worlds, as counterweights in the great clockwork scheme of the solar system.

Of course, that could be an over simplification, but it is perhaps worth thinking about in these terms. When you look at the wider galaxy, and indeed the wider universe, you see that on every scale, the things which happen in one place, can have an affect over time, which acts on regions of space unimaginable distances from the origin point of the given occurrence. Even at the moment of the big bang, just a little more anti matter, and a little less matter, or the opposite alternative, would have resulted in totally different circumstances than the ones which prevail over this entire universe we are in.

So, is it reasonable to assume that dead worlds are purposeless? No. Everything that has happened in this universe, and everything that ever will, affects the rest of the whole universe. Some of these things, many of them in fact, may have consequences which are so small, or so slow to come to fruit, that one might miss them entirely, but from the smallest particles in the universe, to the largest accumulations of mass, matter, and energy, everything is fundamentally connected to everything else, every action, every object, every mote of existence, to every other.

The problem we have in perception of these things, is that our lives play out over such tiny, insignificant periods of time, compared with the time scales over which the vastest and grandest schemes which govern the spin of galaxies play out. We are less than seconds in a vast ocean of eons, and it is little wonder therefore, that the finer balance of these matters escapes us with such ease as it does!

lifeless or uninhabitable planets were instrumental in building a solar system around a proto star...

if rocky planets or gas giants were not there the Star might be so humongous it would go supernova very early in It's lifetime

perhaps the rare Stars with no solar system planets turn out to be A deadly Magnetar

Magnetar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field. The magnetic field decay powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation...

planets, even lifeless ones, are necessary in the equilibrium of the cosmos

a reply to: radkrish

I believe that the purpose of many lifeless planets is to show us the many different ways to make a planet, and how many things have be be set just right to support life.

a reply to: radkrish

The same purpose of all things in this universe to create through destruction to produce.

a reply to: radkrish

Maybe it is still developing and in the remote future will be home to some type of being? There could be a type of life living on them that we are unable to recognize? Maybe there purpose is for gravitational stabilization within the solar system? They could be a protective measure for the inhabited planets as they absorb a lot of space debris?

a reply to: radkrish

Assuming something needs a purpose, is your first clue there is no god.


Sometimes things simply exist, with out rhyme, reason, or meaningful purpose.

What purpose does ISIS Represent? Same thing.