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  • Hacker News
  • Is there any plausible way for a human to ever reach one given what we know about physics at the present?
    by fred_is_fred
  • “ Most astrobiologists think water must be present on a planet’s surface for life to arise there, and indeed the first bacteria appeared on Earth almost as soon as water pooled on its cooling surface roughly four billion years ago. But if Earth were just 2 percent closer to the sun, that pooling wouldn’t have happened. Instead, all of Earth’s water would have boiled away. We got lucky”
    by dr_dshiv
  • More hospitable? You mean like, a planet with no ice on it?
    by andai
  • I suspect that many lush worlds would not have oxygen atmospheres.

    Oxygen is really a deadly poison, to many theoretical lifeforms. There's a good chance that an alien landing on Earth would be unable to breathe our air.

    Of course, it could be argued that we are well on our way to not being able to breathe Earth's air[0].

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPrAuF2f_oI

    by ChrisMarshallNY
  • If one of these worlds interests humanity enough to have a coordinated attempt to reach there, that itself will be a huge win in terms of the side effect technology benefits that will come out of it.
    by oarla
  • Anyone else feel ripped off? There are solar systems with 6 possible Earth like planets and others with Super Earth Garden Worlds and what do we get? One measly mediocre Earth with our nearest neighbors being a poisonous rock and boiling ball of acid.
    by bluejay2387
  • one thing to point out: with a planet that is 20-30% larger than the earth the rocket equation makes it almost it impossible to get out of the atmosphere with chemical rocket technology. So even if you could visit, we could probably only have drop ships or rovers. coming back out of the gravity well without space elevators or stuff would be very hard. It also means that life on those planets would be hard for them to establish a space faring society.
    by harshaw
  • Well, being a Continental World I would assume our Habitability is at 80% (although we've employed a lot of Terraforming so perhaps we're higher than that now) - but if we could locate a Gaia World in any Hyperlane-adjacent system, that would certainly be a great 100% Habitability target for any future colony ships.
    by brooke2k

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