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Nic_Smith comments on Planets in the habitable zone, the Drake Equation, and the Great Filter - Less Wrong
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A thought I've wanted to bounce off of LW for a while -- could clothes be a great filter? They allow and encourage on-planet exploration as individuals are able to survive and thrive in climes they're not innately adapted to, and also allow for quick-switching of adaptation for different weather, which seems to aid long-distance communication and trade. While I think that Wikipedia exaggerates slightly when it says that "The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic" (hermit crabs?), it is nonetheless much rarer than even intelligence or tool-use (and like both of these traits, humans go to extremes). It might not occur to even a very intelligent species to wear something in order to go into space. The technology used just to move around the surface of their own planet might be really clunky and uncomfortable for several generations of development.
I'm going with 'No'. How about "insy winsey filter" that is optional?
Or you could just subsume 'clothes' into 'technology' and leave it at that.
A more likely Great Filter would be a lack of distinct climates, seasons, etc. altogether. The problem that would raise isn't that the species would be too stupid to come up with the idea of tools-to-put-on-your-body (and yet smart enough to otherwise be capable of reasoning and tool use?), but that a lack of variation over time and space would discourage the evolution of generalist or adaptive intelligence in the first place. Instead, all life-bearing planets would be dominated by highly niche-specific super-effective super-simple organisms with no real competition. This seems like a plausible explanation of the Great Silence to me, because very few planets have seasons. If inhabited planets also tend to be 'boring' (e.g., to have a fairly uniform temperature or terrain, or to be sheltered from major asteroid impacts), that could explain why generalist species, including adaptive reasoners, haven't evolved.
Could there be an inhabitable planet without distinct climates?
Yes. Why would climatic homogeneity prevent any of the building blocks for abiogenesis? At first glance, I'd expect it to make things easier for life.
I was asking whether it's physically possible for a planet, especially one that's got land masses, to not have climates.