We Used Science to Create the Perfect Super-Earth

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Our hottest update for Starbirds is out now. Earth seems
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like a paradise for life, but it's actually kind of mid.
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Big parts of it are covered by hostile deserts of ice, fire, rock,
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or darkness. Could there be a planet that's not just
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more suitable for life, but ideal? So perfect for the
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emergence of life, filled with not just biomass, but also biodiversity...
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that Earth is a barren desert compared to them. As
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we've begun to look deep into our galaxy, we've found
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a new and weird type of planet, super Earths, planets
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larger than Earth that have the potential to not only
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host life, but to be super habitable. Let's take all
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the science on exoplanets we have and imagine a perfect world, Hestia,
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after the Greek goddess of the comfy home, the best
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possible planet for life in the universe. First of all,
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we want a perfect star. The perfect star for the
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perfect world. The perfect world needs a perfect star, but
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that may not be a yellow dwarf like our sun
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because they die in under 10 billion years and keep
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getting hotter as they age. 70% of the window for
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life on Earth has already passed. Earth has a mere
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couple of billion years left before the sun ends it all.
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70% of stars are red dwarfs. pretty small and alive
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for trillions of years, basically forever. Since they're not that
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bright and hot, their habitable zones, where water can be liquid,
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are pretty close to them, which makes it very likely
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that their planets are tidally locked, one hemisphere a hot
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desert and the other an icy hell. Also, young red
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dwarfs tend to vomit deadly radiation that sterilizes their planets
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or boils their oceans away. The perfect stars for life
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might be orange dwarfs. In the Goldilocks zone between red
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and yellow dwarfs, their energy output is very stable, radiation
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tends to be less aggressive, and most importantly, they live
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up to 70 billion years, giving life plenty of time
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to emerge, evolve, and thrive. So here's our perfect star,
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an orange dwarf, born 3 billion years ago in a
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calm galactic neighborhood. For the next tens of billions of years,
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it will be super stable. Among dead rock planets and
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massive gas giants, one planet is our super-habitable super-Earth, Hestia,
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where life can thrive like nowhere else in the universe.
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The perfect planet, a super-habitable world. Hestia's radius is 1.3
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times Earth's, so it has 70% more surface area, a
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lot more space for life. With almost twice Earth's mass
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and 20% more surface gravity, walking on it you'd feel
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20% heavier. Unfortunately, It's a hot, dead desert. Like Mars
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and Venus today, it's still missing two things. Firstly, a
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magnetic field that protects Hestia from solar storms and the
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cosmic radiation that sterilize its surface and blow its atmosphere
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away like poor Mars. So deep inside, Hestia gets a
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massive metallic core spinning in a liquid mantle that creates
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a magnetic field of exactly the right strength for super
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strong protection. And Hestia needs plate tectonics to mix its
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surface around. Venus turned into a 470-degree hell because without
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tectonic plates breaking and mixing, the tension and heat below
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its surface unloads in apocalyptic volcanic eruptions. Continental plates moving
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into the depths also remove CO2 from the surface, which
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is great because excess CO2 makes the atmosphere heat up
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too much. and they bring up a vital mix of water, minerals,
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and elements that life can feast on. We also have
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something for you to feast on, our latest video game.
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We've been working on this game together with the amazing
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birds over at Tucana Interactive for almost three years. Starbirds
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is a relaxing factory building and resource management game in
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which you mine asteroids, collect resources, craft goods, and create
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brain-twisting interstellar production networks. Level by level, you guide your
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crew to new star systems, each with its own set
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of challenges. Frosty cold, scorching heat, and... Wait, is that
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an alien tentacle? Since we launched the game in Early
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Access last year, A lot has changed thanks to all
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the feedback we received from those of you who've already
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played it. We continued the story campaign and added two
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whole new star systems, introducing many more levels, production buildings,
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and alien life. There's also a brand new free play
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mode that lets you travel beyond the story campaign and
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generate your own levels. And we also added controller support
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if you'd rather play on the couch or on the
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go with your Steam Deck. This is the second big
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update before we gear up for the grand finale. We're
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looking forward to your feedback and experiences and are now
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hard at work on the last big content update, the
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Starbirds full release. Grab Starbirds for a special early bird
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discount on Steam now. Okay, now that the basis for
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life is set, let's see how the surface turns out.
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We still need to make a bunch of character choices
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to make Hestia super habitable. Each upgrade comes with trade-offs
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life has to work with. We want Hestia to have
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mild seasons that create migration, boom and bust cycles, and
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evolutionary pressure, so we tilt its axis slightly and give
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it 36-hour days, and four small moons that hang like
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pearls in the night sky. Moons are crucial because with
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the right resonance, they create stability, avoiding overly punishing disruptions.
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The perfect land. Wet, isolated, warm. Earth has one huge downside.
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Most of its land is bound in large continents, whose
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central areas are very far away from water, creating deserts
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with scarce resources and hostile environments. So for Hestia, we
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maximize coastlines and avoid megacontinents. We'll give it many fragmented
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continental plates, creating a geology that's ideal for producing long
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island arcs. Hestia is now an archipelago world, with a
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few dozen continents and millions of islands of all sizes
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and shapes. All of its land has access to water,
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salt or fresh, without a single desert, creating the maximum
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land surface area for life. Hestia's biomass on land is
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also supercharged because we'll make it 5 degrees Celsius warmer
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than Earth. This doesn't sound like much, but as we know,
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Earth has plenty of spaces that are uncomfortably cold for
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much of the year, while tropical rainforests have ideal conditions
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for life. On Earth, they hold more biomass than any
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other land ecosystem, and Hestia is nothing but tropical forests
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and ice-free polar regions. Hestia's islands have hundreds of thousands
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of unique habitats, with hundreds of thousands of little private
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niches to fill, each home to unique creatures that are
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ultra-specialized for it. All possible variations on a theme manifest
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in different species, one stranger than the next. On Earth,
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tropical forests like the ones in these islands house 50%
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of all species on just 10% of its land. The
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isolated tropical islands have given nature thousands of attempts at
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building funny tree-type things that densely cover Hestia. On Earth,
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plants are green to best catch energy from the sun,
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but with Hestia's orange dwarf, they take on darker shades
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to hoard the fainter light We could spend hours diving
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into cacti forest islands where slow-moving hunter plants shoot poison
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needles at screeching feathered lemurs or the fungi forests of
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the high plateaus dominated by armored centipede lizards. But we
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should move on to another ecosystem that Earth can only
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dream of. The sky. The best possible sky. Another world
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to inhabit. Hestia's large mass holds gases much firmer than Earth,
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so its atmosphere is much thicker, with just under one
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and a half times the pressure, but much richer in
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oxygen and CO2. This could be catastrophic for life because
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high levels of oxygen make wildfires more likely and more devastating.
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But since Hestia is so warm and humid, evaporation produces
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so much rain that wildfires never get powerful enough to
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wipe out ecosystems. The upsides are clearly worth it. On Earth,
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the size of animals that breathe by diffusion is limited,
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which might be a good thing for us, but on Hestia,
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all kinds of weird creatures can grow huge, like the
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four-legged insect Megafants, dominating the largest continent. All that oxygen
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also lets animals have a faster metabolism and sustain higher
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activity levels. Predators hunt more explosively, prey flees more dynamically,
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especially in a completely new dimension conquered by life. In
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Earth's thin atmosphere, flight costs a lot of energy, but
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in Hestia's super-dense air, it's super-cheap. Despite the higher surface gravity,
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animals need much smaller wings and less energy to stay afloat.
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Over billions of years, thousands of branches of Hestia's evolutionary
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tree have discovered flight, and the skies are full of
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flying animals of all sizes. Like this sky whale shooting
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through the clouds, swallowing millions of tiny bird-like critters. Enormous
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as they are, they never touch the ground except to
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lay eggs and when they die. The thick atmosphere also
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does another thing really well, transfer sound. Hestia is not
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a quiet place. Anywhere you are, animals are communicating, warning
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each other or screaming for mates. This created super weird
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adaptations like hunters not trying to sneak up but masking
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their direction of attack with disturbing and distracting noises. But
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we haven't even talked about the largest ecosystem. The best
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possible oceans. As many edges as possible. Earth's oceans make
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up most of its surface and are on average 3,700
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meters deep. But sunlight can only reach 200 meters deep.
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This sunlight zone is the only place plankton The bases
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for the food web can turn sunlight into sugar, so
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it's where 90% of marine species live. 95% of the
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sea is in permanent darkness, much of it an abyssal desert.
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So we don't want Hestia to have as much water
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as Earth. We do want to cover most of its surface,
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but it should be shallow. Almost all of its oceans
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should be continental shelves 1 to 200 meters deep. Virtually
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all of the ocean and its floor is a sunlight zone.
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There are downsides to shallow oceans, of course. They heat
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and cool faster, which creates stronger seasons and more storms.
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But again, disruptions drive life to specialize and make it
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more diverse. Hestia's oceans house breathtakingly vast ecosystems. Corals form
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living megacities stretching over thousands of kilometers, home to trillions
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of animals competing for real estate and forming complex relationships.
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Pseudocrabs and fish lizards and whatever this thing is supposed
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to be. Bordering the megacities are kelp and algae colonies
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filled with life like tropical rainforests. But there's another biodiversity supercharger, coastlines,
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where land and sea ecosystems meet, nutrients mix, birds eat fish,
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and crocodiles hunt gorillas. Even if they occupy only 7%
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of the total marine area, they're home to more than
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half of marine life. Hestia's coastlines are 45 times longer
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than Earth's, creating niches for dozens of millions of species.
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A pretty mid-planet like Earth hosts some 9 million complex species. Hestia,
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with its huge surface area, super-habitable conditions and sheer endless ecosystems,
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could hold hundreds of millions. What about intelligent life? Our
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perfect planet has so many ecosystems and opportunities that it
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would probably develop sooner or later. Maybe even multiple times
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at once. Imagine a planet where different alien civilizations exist
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in parallel, each with their own empires of stone and wood,
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maybe metal and silicon. How different would their perspective on
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living things and the nature of life be? Would they
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try to eradicate each other? Respect nature more or less?
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on a planet where any wounds you cut would be
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filled up in no time? What would they think of
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our desert planet with winters and ice, with a few
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specks of green? Would they look at space and say
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no thank you to planets that are so obviously inferior?
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We don't know if a planet like Hestia exists, but
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it actually could. Maybe among the quadrillions of planets in
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the universe, somewhere around a small and super-stable orange dwarf,
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