We Used Science to Create the Perfect Super-Earth

Our hottest update for Star Birds is out now! Earth seems like a paradise for 

life but it's actually kind of mid. Big parts of it are covered by hostile 

deserts of ice, fire, rock or darkness. Could there be a planet that is not

just more suitable for life, but ideal? So perfect for the emergence of

life, filled with not just biomass but also biodiversity that Earth is 

a barren desert compared to them. As we have begun to look deep into our galaxy 

we’ve found a new and weird type of planet: Superearths, planets larger than Earth that have the potential to not only host 

life but to be superhabitable. Let's take all the science on exoplanets

we have and imagine a perfect world: Hestia – after the Greek goddess of the comfy home – the best possible 

planet for life in the universe. First of all, we want a perfect star. The Perfect Star for the Perfect World The perfect world needs a perfect star – 

but that may not be a yellow dwarf like our sun because they die in under 10 billion 

years and keep getting hotter as they age. 70% of the window for life 

on earth has already passed. Earth has a mere couple of billion

years left before the sun ends it all. 70% of stars are red dwarfs. Pretty small and alive for trillions 

of years, basically forever. Since they’re not that bright 

and hot, their habitable zones, where water can be liquid, 

are pretty close to them. Which makes it very likely that 

their planets are tidally locked, one hemisphere a hot desert 

and the other an icy hell. Also, young red dwarfs tend 

to vomit deadly radiation that sterilizes their planets 

or boils their oceans away. The perfect stars for life might be orange dwarfs. In the goldilocks zone between red and yellow 

dwarfs, their energy output is very stable, radiation tends to be less 

aggressive and most importantly: They live up to 70 billion years, giving life 

plenty of time to emerge, evolve and thrive. So here’s our perfect star: an orange dwarf, born 3 billion years ago in a 

calm galactic neighbourhood. For the next tens of billions of 

years it will be super stable. Among dead rock planets and massive gas 

giants, one planet is our superhabitable superearth Hestia, where life can thrive 

like nowhere else in the universe. The Perfect Planet: A Superhabitable World Hestia’s radius is 1.3 times Earth’s, so it has 

70% more surface area – a lot more space for life. With almost twice earth’s mass 

and 20% more surface gravity, walking on it you’d feel 20% heavier. Unfortunately it's a hot dead desert. Like Mars and Venus today, 

it’s still missing two things: Firstly, a magnetic field that protects 

Hestia from solar storms and the cosmic radiation that sterilize its surface and 

blow its atmosphere away like poor Mars. So deep inside Hestia gets a massive metallic 

core spinning in a liquid mantle that creates a magnetic field of exactly the right 

strength for super strong protection. And Hestia needs plate tectonics 

to mix its surface around. Venus turned into a 470 degree hell, because 

without tectonic plates breaking and mixing, the tension and heat below its surface 

unloads in apocalyptic volcanic eruptions. Continental plates moving into the depths also 

remove CO2 from the surface, which is great, because excess CO2 makes the 

atmosphere heat up too much. And they bring up a vital mix of water, 

minerals and elements that life can feast on. We also have something for you to 

feast on: our latest video game! We’ve been working on this game together with the amazing birds over at Toukana 

Interactive for almost three years. Star Birds is a relaxing factory building and resource management game in which 

you mine asteroids, collect resources, craft goods and create brain-twisting 

interstellar production networks. Level by level, you guide your crew to new star 

systems, each one with its own set of challenges: frosty cold, scorching heat and … 

wait, is that an alien tentacle?! Bwahhh Since we launched the game 

in Early Access last year, a lot has changed thanks to all the feedback we 

received from those of you who already played it. We continued the story campaign and 

added two whole new star systems, introducing many more levels, 

production buildings, and alien life! There’s also a brand-new freeplay 

mode that lets you travel beyond the story campaign and generate your own levels. And, we also added controller 

support if you’d rather play on the couch or on the go with your Steam Deck. This is the second big update 

before we gear up for the grand finale. We're looking forward to your 

feedback and experiences and are now hard at work on the last big content 

update, the Star Birds full release! Grab Star Birds for a special 

early bird discount on Steam now! Ok, now that the basis for life is set, 

let’s see how the surface turns out! We still need to make a bunch of character 

choices to make Hestia superhabitable. Each upgrade comes with 

tradeoffs life has to work with. We want Hestia to have mild 

seasons that create migration, boom and bust cycles and evolutionary 

pressure, so we tilt its axis slightly and give it 36 hour days – and four small 

moons that hang like pearls in the night sky. Moons are crucial because 

with the right resonance, they create stability, avoiding 

overly punishing disruptions. The Perfect Land – Wet, Isolated, Warm Earth has one huge downside: most of its land is 

bound in large continents, whose central areas are very far away from water, creating deserts 

with scarce resources and hostile environments. So for Hestia, we maximize 

coastlines and avoid mega continents. We’ll give it many, fragmented continental plates, creating a geology that is ideal 

for producing long island arcs. Hestia is now an archipelago world, with a few dozen continents and millions 

of islands of all sizes and shapes. All of its land has access to water, 

salt or fresh, without a single desert, creating the maximum land surface area for life. Hestia’s biomass on land is also supercharged 

because we’ll make it 5°C warmer than earth. This doesn’t sound like much but as we know, 

earth has plenty of spaces that are uncomfortably cold for much of the year, while tropical 

rainforests have ideal conditions for life. On Earth they hold more biomass 

than any other land ecosystem, and Hestia is nothing but tropical 

forests, and ice free polar regions. Hestia’s islands have hundreds 

of thousands of unique habitats, with hundreds of thousands 

of little private niches to fill – each home to unique creatures 

that are ultra-specialized for it. All possible variations on a theme manifest in 

different species, one stranger than the next. On Earth tropical forests like 

the ones in these islands house 50% of all species on just 10% of its land. The isolated tropical islands have given 

nature thousands of attempts at building funny tree type things that densely cover Hestia. On earth, plants are green to best catch energy 

from the sun – but with Hestia’s orange dwarf, they take on darker shades 

to hoard the fainter light. We could spend hours diving 

into cacti forest islands, where slow moving hunter plants shoot poison 

needles at screeching feathered Lemurs, or the fungi forests of the high plateaus, 

dominated by armoured centipede lizards. But we should move on to another ecosystem 

that Earth can only dream of: The sky. The Best Possible Sky – Another World to Inhabit Hestia's large mass holds gases much firmer 

than Earth, so its atmosphere is much thicker with just under one and a half times the 

pressure – but much richer in oxygen and CO2. This could be catastrophic for life 

because high levels of oxygen make wildfires more likely and more devastating 

– but since Hestia is so warm and humid, evaporation produces so much rain that wildfires 

never get powerful enough to wipe out ecosystems. The upsides are clearly worth it: On earth the 

size of animals that breathe by diffusion is limited – which might be a good thing for us 

– but on Hestia all kinds of weird creatures can grow huge, like the four legged insect 

megaphants dominating the largest continent. All that oxygen also lets animals have a faster 

metabolism and sustain higher activity levels. Predators hunt more explosively, prey flees more dynamically – especially in 

a completely new dimension conquered by life: Up. In Earth’s thin atmosphere flight costs a lot of energy – but in Hestia’s super 

dense air, it’s super cheap. Despite the higher surface gravity, animals need 

much smaller wings and less energy to stay afloat. Over billions of years, thousands of 

branches of Hestia’s evolutionary tree have discovered flight, and the skies 

are full of flying animals of all sizes. Like this skywhale shooting through the clouds, 

swallowing millions of tiny bird-like critters. Enormous as they are, they never touch the 

ground except to lay eggs and when they die. The thick atmosphere also does 

another thing really well: Transfer sound. Hestia is not a quiet place. Anywhere you are, animals are communicating, 

warning each other or screaming for mates. This created super weird adaptations 

like hunters not trying to sneak up but masking their direction of attack 

with disturbing and distracting noises. But we haven’t even talked 

about the largest ecosystem: The Best Possible Oceans – 

As many Edges as possible Earth’s oceans make up most of its surface 

and are on average 3700 meters deep. But sunlight can only reach 200 meters deep. This sunlight zone is the only place 

plankton, the basis for the food web, can turn sunlight into sugar – so it 

is where 90% of marine species live. 95% of the sea is in permanent 

darkness, much of it an abyssal desert. So we don’t want Hestia to 

have as much water as Earth. We do want to cover most of its 

surface but it should be shallow. Almost all of its oceans should be continental 

shelves one to two hundred meters deep. Virtually all of the ocean and 

its floor is a sunlight zone. There are downsides to shallow oceans 

of course: they heat and cool faster, which creates stronger seasons and more storms. But again, disruptions drive life to 

specialize and make it more diverse. Hestia’s oceans house 

breathtakingly vast ecosystems: Corals form living megacities stretching 

over thousands of kilometers, home to trillions of animals competing for real 

estate and forming complex relationships. Pseudo crabs and fishlizards and 

whatever this thing is supposed to be. Bordering the megacities are kelp and algae colonies filled with life 

like tropical rainforests. But there’s another biodiversity supercharger: 

coastlines – where land and sea ecosystems meet, nutrients mix, birds eat fish 

and crocodiles hunt gorillas. Even if they occupy only 7% 

of the total marine area, they are home to more than half of marine life. Hestia’s coastlines are 45 

times longer than Earth’s creating niches for dozens of millions of species. A pretty mid planet like Earth 

hosts some 9 million complex species – Hestia with its huge surface area, super habitable conditions and sheer endless 

ecosystems – could hold hundreds of millions. What about intelligent life? Well, our perfect planet has so many ecosystems and opportunities that it would 

probably develop sooner or later. Maybe even multiple times at once. Imagine a planet where different 

alien civilizations exist in parallel, each with their own empires of stone 

and wood, maybe metal and silicon. How different would their perspective 

on living things and the nature of life be? Would they try to eradicate each other? Respect nature more or less – on a planet where 

any wound you cut would be filled up in no time. What would they think of our desert planet 

with winters and ice, with a few specs of green? Would they look at space and say “no thank 

you” to planets that are so obviously inferior? We don’t know if a planet like Hestia exists. But it actually could. Maybe among the quadrillions 

of planets in the universe, somewhere around a small and superstable 

orange dwarf, there is a place that is home to more life today than earth 

has hosted in its entire history. Here at Kurzgesagt, we know a thing 

or two about helping people learn. For instance, for most of human history, the best way to learn something hard was 

to learn from someone who already knew it. On a perfect planet, every student 

would have access to a great tutor. But that simply hasn’t been possible. Until now. Meet the new Brilliant. Brilliant just launched a world-class

tutor, and his name is Koji. Like the best human tutors, Koji 

doesn’t just give you answers. He guides you to find them yourself. You can ask him questions, have him 

clarify concepts, or break down problems. And when you get stuck, 

Koji helps you get unstuck. He can see and draw right on your 

screen, bringing concepts to life, helping you see different ways of approaching 

a problem, and adapting in real time. While other breakthrough technologies simply 

think for you, Koji makes you a better thinker. Brilliant is already our favorite way to learn. Its curriculum is designed by 

experts from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech – covering math and coding 

from grade 5 through college and beyond. It's also perfect for summer break, helping students return to school 

even sharper than when they left. A perfect planet gives life 

the conditions to emerge. Brilliant gives minds the conditions to flourish. Click the link below to get started 

with Brilliant’s tutor for free. You can also upgrade to Premium to get full tutor support. And right now, kurzgesagt viewers can get 20% off 

an annual subscription at Brilliant.org/nutshell