This generator makes it possible to simulate each time a brand new exoplanet (non-existent, but “credible”).
What could a habitable planet look like that is not Earth? To date, we have already discovered a few thousand exoplanets. This type of discovery often gives rise to somewhat strong announcements of coffee, such as a ” potentially habitable planet “. This usually means that the planet is in the “habitable” zone, neither too close nor too far from its star.
But, for now, these claims are often overdone, because we haven’t actually identified an exoplanet that could be said to be habitable for biological life as we know it. What might a habitable exoplanet look like? This is the question that the Earthlike.world site tries to answer. It is a simulator: from climate models, it generates a relatively believable exoplanet, a kind of cousin of the Earth.
” Vary the proportion of land, volcanism, and position in the habitable zone, all of which have varied over Earth’s history. Does the resulting surface temperature suggest a world that really resembles the one we live in, or a truly alien concoction? »
Build your exoplanet
On the home page, you must enter a few ingredients: the proportion of the exoplanet covered by land, the level of volcanism, the position within the habitable zone. The “advanced toolkit” functionality allows you to define more advanced characteristics.
In each box that you must enter, the site tells you what value corresponds to planet Earth. This allows you to move away from it to better compare the result with our own earth.
You then just have to click on “Discover a new world”. The build process can take up to a minute. You will then discover a dashboard that will allow you to compare the conditions on Earth and those on the imaginary exoplanet that you have just discovered.
By clicking on “Render my planet”, you will also obtain a map – which will again take a few tens of seconds to appear. ” EARTH-LIKE also produces a unique rendering of your planet’s Earth-like appearance. A land map is created based on the proportion of dry land you have chosen, the rate of volcanism and the resulting surface temperature, then a neural network [un algorithme] transforms it into a realistic landscape “explains the site. This results in a ” different worldt” each time you generate a new planet.
A bot on Twitter
The site is also associated to a Twitter bot. If you subscribe to the account, you will see there, every day, several new exoplanets with their particular characteristics. But you can also interrogate the bot by asking it to generate, on Twitter directly, a land.
It suffices, for example, to write, like us, “ I’d like Earth-Like planet with a land fraction of 0.5, volcanism rate of 4.2 and a habitable zone position of 0.8! “. And here it is, a few minutes later, the bot pulls out an exoplanet for you: