Before about 500 million years ago, most probably our planet experienced
temporary snowball conditions, with continental and sea ices covering a
large fraction of its surface. This points to a potential bistability of
Earth's climate that can have at least two different (statistical)
equilibrium states for the same external forcing (i.e. solar radiation).
Here, we explore the probability of finding bistable climates in
Earth-like exoplanets and consider the properties of planetary climates
obtained by varying the semimajor orbital axis (thus, received stellar
radiation), eccentricity and obliquity, and atmospheric pressure. To
this goal, we use the Earth-like planet surface temperature model
(ESTM), an extension of one-dimensional Energy Balance Models developed
to provide a numerically efficient climate estimator for parameter
sensitivity studies and long climatic simulations. After verifying that
the ESTM is able to reproduce Earth climate bistability, we identify the
range of parameter space where climate bistability is detected. An
intriguing result of this work is that the planetary conditions that
support climate bistability are remarkably similar to those required for
the sustenance of complex, multicellular life on the planetary surface.
The interpretation of this result deserves further investigation, given
its relevance for the potential distribution of life in exoplanetary
systems