The Second Earth
In the universe, there are hundreds of billions upon hundreds of billions of planets. Out of those planets, a third of them can support life. However, the conditions to survive on these “habitable” planets are still extreme. Such conditions range from intense weather to high gravity. Although the likelihood of finding a planet exactly like Earth may seem impossible as so few planets get close to the habitability that Earth does, one stands out from the crowd.
Located 1402 Light Years from Earth, Kepler-452b is a planet so similar to Earth that it is often called Earth 2.0. It revolves around its parent star in the habitable zone, the golden area for supporting life in which a celestial body can stay far enough to not get burned, but not too far away that it freezes. The peculiar thing about this specific planet is that it has a weather system, clouds, and even an ocean! In fact, finding a planet just like Kepler is so rare that there are only 55 known planets like Kepler that could actually support human life - unlike the billions of others that can only host microbial species. To put in perspective of how scarce this find is, if we divide the 55 planets like Kepler by the estimated 40 billion other habitable planets, we would find out that these human-life-supporting celestial bodies can only be found once out of every 1.3 billion planets.
If we take a deeper dive into Kepler-452B we can discover a lot more. Despite having too thick of an atmosphere to see anything on the surface of this planet, using past data, we can already start making predictions of how the surface might look as well as how living on Kepler-452B will be. Below are a couple 3d artist depictions made by Melodsheep of how some life forms might look like depending on gravity and environment.
To start off Kepler-452b has around twice the mass of Earth and as a result has double gravity. Kepler also has a circular orbit, close to that of Earth’s. However, something quite perplexing about this planet is that it has close to a 90 degree tilt. This means that there are almost no seasons, no known moons, and a rather broken day and night cycle to say the least. On the bright side, it does have land and water and is around 6 billion years old (2 billion years older than Earth!). This means that it is very likely that this planet was given adequate time to develop any possible life forms, whether it be on land or in the water. The scary thing is that if any intelligent species was found on this planet, there is a possibility that they would be more advanced than us. Below is an example of a possible humanoid life form also made by Melodysheep.
This leads us down the rabbit hole of the Kepler star systems. The Kepler star systems are far older than us and were given almost identical conditions to live as humans were. There is about a 1-2 billion year gap between Earth and all of the other habitable planets in the Kepler Systems. This 2 billion year gap gives the opportunity for many things to happen. For all we know, there could’ve been entire civilizations that remained unknown during the discovery of Kepler-452B. Something that you should know and keep in your mind into the far future is that when the time comes and we find another intelligent being like us, it is likely that they already found us millions of years before we found them.
There is much more to be said about the Kepler Star Systems and Kepler 452B itself, but if there is any other information you would like to know, you can always tell us through the comments or through my personal EMail.
