While I'm sure a nice science fiction scenario could be constructed, who can really know? The only place in a cold brown dwarf that would be remotely habitable to anything we currently understand as life would be a thin layer of the upper atmosphere. But presumably the atmosphere is convective over a much greater zone, which means that a scenario where life could exist seems difficult to construct.jackkessler wrote:While this discussion is interesting it is beside the point. A considerably more interesting question is not whether human being could survive on the surface of a brown dwarf, but whether viruses or even bacteria could. The effects of gravity on creatures at that scale is insignificant on earth. Would they be able to endure on a brown dwarf? Or to evolve there in the first place?
That's not necessarily very good shielding. We are protected by Earth's magnetic field; without that, there would be little or no life on Earth. No such protection exists at the top of the atmosphere of a brown dwarf.I am not impressed with the radiation argument. We live near a star that produces vastly greater amounts of vastly more energetic radiation and we do just fine with it. The surface would be shielded from thermonuclear processes in the core by the entire radius of the brown dwarf.
