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Could a 'super-Earth' be even more habitable than our own planet?


Night Hunter

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There's reason to believe that other planets might be better for supporting life as we know it, and they might not even be that far off, cosmically speaking.

 

 

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It's popular to talk about how wonderful, beautiful and rare a treasure our planet is; I certainly say such things all the time, and many satellite, Instagram and Pinterest photos testify to this truism. But let's be real for a minute, my fellow humans and A.I. beings -- we don't really have firsthand experience with an adequate sample size of habitable planets to say this for sure.

 
In fact, a pair of scientists have been looking into the possibility that there might be a distant planet (or a couple of them or maybe 3 billion) out there more suitable to supporting life as we know it. They even describe what such a "superhabitable" planet might look like -- a super-Earth with a mass double or triple that of our planet, orbiting in the habitable zone around a K-type dwarf star several billion years older than our sun.
 
The basic explanation for why such a planet would make a "better Earth" is that it might have a long-lasting magnetic field, which protects the planet from the abundant radiation of space and stars, and plate tectonics activity, which keeps some of the key life-supporting elements in balance. Also, a planet with double or triple the mass of Earth would mean more surface gravity, likely forming more shallow lakes and oceans, more archipelago-like land masses and fewer deserts. More shallow waters might mean more biodiversity, as they typically do here on our planet.
 
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