Why Earth Sucks Compared to the Planet Hestia

0:00 Our hottest update for Star Birds is out now!

0:05 Earth seems like a paradise for life but it's actually kind of mid.

0:11 Big parts of it are covered by hostile deserts of ice, fire, rock or darkness.

0:17 Could there be a planet that is not just more suitable for life, but ideal?

0:22 So perfect for the emergence of life,

0:24 filled with not just biomass but also biodiversity

0:28 that Earth is a barren desert compared to them.

0:33 As we have begun to look deep into our galaxy

0:36 we’ve found a new and weird type of planet:

0:38 Superearths, planets larger than Earth that have the potential

0:42 to not only host life but to be superhabitable.

0:45 Let's take all the science on exoplanets we have and imagine a perfect world:

0:50 Hestia– after the Greek goddess of the comfy home–

0:54 the best possible planet for life in the universe.

0:57 First of all, we want a perfect star.

1:00 The Perfect Star for the Perfect World The perfect

1:03 world needs a perfect star– but that may not be

1:06 a yellow dwarf like our sun because they die in under

1:09 10 billion years and keep getting hotter as they age.

1:12 70% of the window for life on earth has already passed.

1:16 Earth has a mere couple of billion years left before the sun ends it all.

1:21 70% of stars are red dwarfs.

1:24 Pretty small and alive for trillions of years, basically forever.

1:28 Since they’re not that bright and hot, their habitable zones,

1:31 where water can be liquid, are pretty close to them.

1:33 Which makes it very likely that their planets are tidally locked,

1:37 one hemisphere a hot desert and the other an icy hell.

1:41 Also, young red dwarfs tend to vomit deadly radiation

1:44 that sterilizes their planets or boils their oceans away.

1:48 The perfect stars for life might be orange dwarfs.

1:52 In the goldilocks zone between red and yellow dwarfs,

1:55 their energy output is very stable,

1:58 radiation tends to be less aggressive and most importantly:

2:02 They live up to 70 billion years,

2:05 giving life plenty of time to emerge, evolve and thrive.

2:09 So here’s our perfect star: an orange dwarf,

2:12 born 3 billion years ago in a calm galactic neighbourhood.

2:16 For the next tens of billions of years it will be super stable.

2:20 Among dead rock planets and massive gas giants,

2:23 one planet is our superhabitable superearth Hestia,

2:26 where life can thrive like nowhere else in the universe.

2:31 The Perfect Planet: A Superhabitable World Hestia’s radius is 1.3 times Earth’s,

2:37 so it has 70% more surface area– a lot more space for life.

2:42 With almost twice earth’s mass and 20% more surface gravity,

2:46 walking on it you’d feel 20% heavier.

2:49 Unfortunately it's a hot dead desert.

2:52 Like Mars and Venus today, it’s still missing two things: Firstly,

2:56 a magnetic field that protects Hestia from solar storms and the cosmic

3:00 radiation that sterilize its surface and blow

3:03 its atmosphere away like poor Mars.

3:05 So deep inside Hestia gets a massive metallic core spinning in a liquid mantle

3:10 that creates a magnetic field of exactly

3:12 the right strength for super strong protection.

3:15 And Hestia needs plate tectonics to mix its surface around.

3:19 Venus turned into a 470 degree hell,

3:22 because without tectonic plates breaking and mixing,

3:25 the tension and heat below its

3:28 surface unloads in apocalyptic volcanic eruptions.

3:31 Continental plates moving into the depths also remove CO2 from the surface,

3:35 which is great, because excess CO2 makes the atmosphere heat up too much.

3:40 And they bring up a vital mix of water,

3:42 minerals and elements that life can feast on.

3:45 We also have something for you to feast on: our latest video game!

3:49 We’ve been working on this game together with the amazing

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4:15 scorching heat and… wait, is that an alien tentacle?!

4:20 Bwahhh Since we launched the game in Early Access last year,

4:24 a lot has changed thanks to all the feedback

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5:13 Ok, now that the basis for life is set, let’s see how the surface turns out!

5:18 We still need to make a bunch

5:20 of character choices to make Hestia superhabitable.

5:22 Each upgrade comes with tradeoffs life has to work with.

5:26 We want Hestia to have mild seasons that create migration,

5:30 boom and bust cycles and evolutionary pressure,

5:33 so we tilt its axis slightly and give it 36 hour days–

5:37 and four small moons that hang like pearls in the night sky.

5:41 Moons are crucial because with the right resonance,

5:44 they create stability, avoiding overly punishing disruptions.

5:48 The Perfect Land– Wet, Isolated, Warm Earth has one huge downside:

5:55 most of its land is bound in large continents,

5:58 whose central areas are very far away from water,

6:02 creating deserts with scarce resources and hostile environments.

6:05 So for Hestia, we maximize coastlines and avoid mega continents.

6:10 We’ll give it many, fragmented continental plates,

6:13 creating a geology that is ideal for producing long island arcs.

6:18 Hestia is now an archipelago world,

6:20 with a few dozen continents and millions of islands of all sizes and shapes.

6:25 All of its land has access to water, salt or fresh,

6:29 without a single desert, creating the maximum land surface area for life.

6:33 Hestia’s biomass on land is also supercharged

6:36 because we’ll make it 5°C warmer than earth.

6:40 This doesn’t sound like much but as we know,

6:42 earth has plenty of spaces that are uncomfortably cold for much of the year,

6:46 while tropical rainforests have ideal conditions for life.

6:49 On Earth they hold more biomass than any other land ecosystem,

6:54 and Hestia is nothing but tropical forests, and ice free polar regions.

6:59 Hestia’s islands have hundreds of thousands of unique habitats,

7:02 with hundreds of thousands of little private niches to fill–

7:06 each home to unique creatures that are ultra-specialized for it.

7:09 All possible variations on a theme manifest in different species,

7:14 one stranger than the next.

7:16 On Earth tropical forests like the ones in these islands

7:19 house 50% of all species on just 10% of its land.

7:23 The isolated tropical islands have given nature thousands of attempts

7:27 at building funny tree type things that densely cover Hestia.

7:31 On earth, plants are green to best catch

7:33 energy from the sun– but with Hestia’s orange dwarf,

7:36 they take on darker shades to hoard the fainter light.

7:40 We could spend hours diving into cacti forest islands,

7:43 where slow moving hunter plants shoot

7:45 poison needles at screeching feathered Lemurs,

7:48 or the fungi forests of the high plateaus,

7:51 dominated by armoured centipede lizards.

7:53 But we should move on to another ecosystem

7:56 that Earth can only dream of: The sky.

8:00 The Best Possible Sky– Another World to Inhabit

8:04 Hestia's large mass holds gases much firmer than Earth,

8:07 so its atmosphere is much thicker with just under one

8:10 and a half times the pressure– but much richer in oxygen and CO2.

8:15 This could be catastrophic for life because high levels of oxygen make wildfires

8:19 more likely and more devastating– but since Hestia is so warm and humid,

8:24 evaporation produces so much rain that wildfires

8:27 never get powerful enough to wipe out ecosystems.

8:30 The upsides are clearly worth it: On earth the size of animals that breathe

8:35 by diffusion is limited– which might be

8:37 a good thing for us– but on Hestia all kinds of weird creatures can grow huge,

8:42 like the four legged insect megaphants dominating the largest continent.

8:46 All that oxygen also lets animals have

8:49 a faster metabolism and sustain higher activity levels.

8:52 Predators hunt more explosively,

8:54 prey flees more dynamically– especially in a completely

8:58 new dimension conquered by life: Up.

9:01 In Earth’s thin atmosphere flight costs a lot of energy–

9:05 but in Hestia’s super dense air, it’s super cheap.

9:09 Despite the higher surface gravity,

9:11 animals need much smaller wings and less energy to stay afloat.

9:14 Over billions of years,

9:16 thousands of branches of Hestia’s evolutionary tree have discovered flight,

9:20 and the skies are full of flying animals of all sizes.

9:25 Like this skywhale shooting through the clouds,

9:28 swallowing millions of tiny bird-like critters.

9:31 Enormous as they are,

9:32 they never touch the ground except to lay eggs and when they die.

9:36 The thick atmosphere also does another thing really well: Transfer sound.

9:41 Hestia is not a quiet place.

9:43 Anywhere you are, animals are communicating,

9:46 warning each other or screaming for mates.

9:49 This created super weird adaptations like hunters not trying to sneak

9:53 up but masking their direction of attack with disturbing and distracting noises.

9:58 But we haven’t even talked about the largest ecosystem:

10:02 The Best Possible Oceans– As many Edges as possible Earth’s oceans make

10:07 up most of its surface and are on average 3700 meters deep.

10:12 But sunlight can only reach 200 meters deep.

10:16 This sunlight zone is the only place plankton, the basis for the food web,

10:20 can turn sunlight into sugar– so it is where 90% of marine species live.

10:25 95% of the sea is in permanent darkness, much of it an abyssal desert.

10:30 So we don’t want Hestia to have as much water as Earth.

10:33 We do want to cover most of its surface but it should be shallow.

10:37 Almost all of its oceans should be

10:39 continental shelves one to two hundred meters deep.

10:42 Virtually all of the ocean and its floor is a sunlight zone.

10:46 There are downsides to shallow oceans of course:

10:48 they heat and cool faster, which creates stronger seasons and more storms.

10:53 But again, disruptions drive life to specialize and make it more diverse.

10:58 Hestia’s oceans house breathtakingly vast ecosystems:

11:03 Corals form living megacities stretching over thousands of kilometers,

11:06 home to trillions of animals competing

11:09 for real estate and forming complex relationships.

11:13 Pseudo crabs and fishlizards and whatever this thing is supposed to be.

11:18 Bordering the megacities are kelp and algae

11:20 colonies filled with life like tropical rainforests.

11:24 But there’s another biodiversity supercharger:

11:26 coastlines– where land and sea ecosystems meet,

11:30 nutrients mix, birds eat fish and crocodiles hunt gorillas.

11:35 Even if they occupy only 7% of the total marine area,

11:38 they are home to more than half of marine life.

11:41 Hestia’s coastlines are 45 times longer than Earth’s

11:45 creating niches for dozens of millions of species.

11:49 A pretty mid planet like Earth hosts some 9

11:52 million complex species– Hestia with its huge surface area,

11:56 super habitable conditions and sheer endless

11:59 ecosystems– could hold hundreds of millions.

12:03 What about intelligent life?

12:06 Well, our perfect planet has so many ecosystems

12:09 and opportunities that it would probably develop sooner or later.

12:13 Maybe even multiple times at once.

12:16 Imagine a planet where different alien civilizations exist in parallel,

12:20 each with their own empires of stone and wood, maybe metal and silicon.

12:25 How different would their perspective on living

12:27 things and the nature of life be?

12:29 Would they try to eradicate each other?

12:32 Respect nature more or less– on a planet where any

12:35 wound you cut would be filled up in no time.

12:39 What would they think of our desert planet with winters and ice,

12:42 with a few specs of green?

12:44 Would they look at space and say “no

12:47 thank you” to planets that are so obviously inferior?

12:50 We don’t know if a planet like Hestia exists.

12:53 But it actually could.

12:55 Maybe among the quadrillions of planets in the universe,

12:58 somewhere around a small and superstable orange dwarf,

13:01 there is a place that is home to more

13:04 life today than earth has hosted in its entire history.

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