Abraham Loeb,
atmosphere,
BIO-Complexity,
distance,
Hubble Space Telescope,
hydrogen,
interstellar dust,
interstellar ship,
Mike Hippke,
Milky Way,
Neptune,
oxidizers,
oxygen,
Physics, Earth & Space,
Proxima Centauri,
rockets,
satellite TV,
solar system,
space travel,
super-earths,
The Privileged Planet,
Tsiolkovsky equation,
Uranus
A few days ago I published the paper “The Solar System: Favored for Space Travel” in the journal BIO-Complexity. I thought it would be helpful for me to give a short summary of the paper to Evolution News readers. I was motivated to do the study after two papers were published in 2018 on the difficulty of launching rockets from super-earths. Super-earths are the most common type of planet that are being discovered around exoplanets. They are somewhat loosely defined as being larger and more massive than Earth but smaller and less massive than Uranus or Neptune. From observations, super-earths seem to transition from rocky to gas-dominated composition above 1.5 times the size of Earth. Two Studies Together, the two studies not only showed that it is more difficult to…