We Used Science to Create the Perfect Super-Earth

Added: 2026-05-26

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

[00:00:05]Earth seems like a paradise for  life but it's actually kind of mid.

[00:00:11]Big parts of it are covered by hostile  deserts of ice, fire, rock or darkness.

[00:00:17]Could there be a planet that is not just more suitable for life, but ideal?

[00:00:22]So perfect for the emergence of life, filled with not just biomass but also biodiversity that Earth is  a barren desert compared to them.

[00:00:33]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.

[00:00:45]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.

[00:00:57]First of all, we want a perfect star.

[00:01:00]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.

[00:01:12]70% of the window for life  on earth has already passed.

[00:01:16]Earth has a mere couple of billion years left before the sun ends it all.

[00:01:21]70% of stars are red dwarfs.

[00:01:24]Pretty small and alive for trillions  of years, basically forever.

[00:01:28]Since they’re not that bright  and hot, their habitable zones, where water can be liquid,  are pretty close to them.

[00:01:33]Which makes it very likely that  their planets are tidally locked, one hemisphere a hot desert  and the other an icy hell.

[00:01:41]Also, young red dwarfs tend  to vomit deadly radiation that sterilizes their planets  or boils their oceans away.

[00:01:48]The perfect stars for life might be orange dwarfs.

[00:01:52]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.

[00:02:09]So here’s our perfect star: an orange dwarf, born 3 billion years ago in a  calm galactic neighbourhood.

[00:02:16]For the next tens of billions of  years it will be super stable.

[00:02:20]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.

[00:02:31]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.

[00:02:42]With almost twice earth’s mass  and 20% more surface gravity, walking on it you’d feel 20% heavier.

[00:02:49]Unfortunately it's a hot dead desert.

[00:02:52]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.

[00:03:05]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.

[00:03:15]And Hestia needs plate tectonics  to mix its surface around.

[00:03:19]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.

[00:03:31]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.

[00:03:40]And they bring up a vital mix of water,  minerals and elements that life can feast on.

[00:03:45]We also have something for you to  feast on: our latest video game!

[00:03:49]We’ve been working on this game together with the amazing birds over at Toukana  Interactive for almost three years.

[00:03:56]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.

[00:04:08]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?!

[00:04:20]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.

[00:04:29]We continued the story campaign and  added two whole new star systems, introducing many more levels,  production buildings, and alien life!

[00:04:38]There’s also a brand-new freeplay  mode that lets you travel beyond the story campaign and generate your own levels.

[00:04:45]And, we also added controller  support if you’d rather play on the couch or on the go with your Steam Deck.

[00:04:51]This is the second big update  before we gear up for the grand finale.

[00:04:55]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!

[00:05:04]Grab Star Birds for a special  early bird discount on Steam now!

[00:05:13]Ok, now that the basis for life is set,  let’s see how the surface turns out!

[00:05:18]We still need to make a bunch of character  choices to make Hestia superhabitable.

[00:05:22]Each upgrade comes with  tradeoffs life has to work with.

[00:05:26]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.

[00:05:41]Moons are crucial because  with the right resonance, they create stability, avoiding  overly punishing disruptions.

[00:05:48]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.

[00:06:05]So for Hestia, we maximize  coastlines and avoid mega continents.

[00:06:10]We’ll give it many, fragmented continental plates, creating a geology that is ideal  for producing long island arcs.

[00:06:18]Hestia is now an archipelago world, with a few dozen continents and millions  of islands of all sizes and shapes.

[00:06:25]All of its land has access to water,  salt or fresh, without a single desert, creating the maximum land surface area for life.

[00:06:33]Hestia’s biomass on land is also supercharged  because we’ll make it 5°C warmer than earth.

[00:06:40]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.

[00:06:49]On Earth they hold more biomass  than any other land ecosystem, and Hestia is nothing but tropical  forests, and ice free polar regions.

[00:06:59]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.

[00:07:09]All possible variations on a theme manifest in  different species, one stranger than the next.

[00:07:16]On Earth tropical forests like  the ones in these islands house 50% of all species on just 10% of its land.

[00:07:23]The isolated tropical islands have given  nature thousands of attempts at building funny tree type things that densely cover Hestia.

[00:07:31]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.

[00:07:40]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.

[00:07:53]But we should move on to another ecosystem  that Earth can only dream of: The sky.

[00:08:00]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.

[00:08:15]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.

[00:08:30]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.

[00:08:46]All that oxygen also lets animals have a faster  metabolism and sustain higher activity levels.

[00:08:52]Predators hunt more explosively, prey flees more dynamically – especially in  a completely new dimension conquered by life: Up.

[00:09:01]In Earth’s thin atmosphere flight costs a lot of energy – but in Hestia’s super  dense air, it’s super cheap.

[00:09:09]Despite the higher surface gravity, animals need  much smaller wings and less energy to stay afloat.

[00:09:14]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.

[00:09:25]Like this skywhale shooting through the clouds,  swallowing millions of tiny bird-like critters.

[00:09:31]Enormous as they are, they never touch the  ground except to lay eggs and when they die.

[00:09:36]The thick atmosphere also does  another thing really well: Transfer sound.

[00:09:41]Hestia is not a quiet place.

[00:09:43]Anywhere you are, animals are communicating,  warning each other or screaming for mates.

[00:09:49]This created super weird adaptations  like hunters not trying to sneak up but masking their direction of attack  with disturbing and distracting noises.

[00:09:58]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.

[00:10:12]But sunlight can only reach 200 meters deep.

[00:10:16]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.

[00:10:25]95% of the sea is in permanent  darkness, much of it an abyssal desert.

[00:10:30]So we don’t want Hestia to  have as much water as Earth.

[00:10:33]We do want to cover most of its  surface but it should be shallow.

[00:10:37]Almost all of its oceans should be continental  shelves one to two hundred meters deep.

[00:10:42]Virtually all of the ocean and  its floor is a sunlight zone.

[00:10:46]There are downsides to shallow oceans  of course: they heat and cool faster, which creates stronger seasons and more storms.

[00:10:53]But again, disruptions drive life to  specialize and make it more diverse.

[00:10:58]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.

[00:11:13]Pseudo crabs and fishlizards and  whatever this thing is supposed to be.

[00:11:18]Bordering the megacities are kelp and algae colonies filled with life  like tropical rainforests.

[00:11:24]But there’s another biodiversity supercharger:  coastlines – where land and sea ecosystems meet, nutrients mix, birds eat fish  and crocodiles hunt gorillas.

[00:11:35]Even if they occupy only 7%  of the total marine area, they are home to more than half of marine life.

[00:11:41]Hestia’s coastlines are 45  times longer than Earth’s creating niches for dozens of millions of species.

[00:11:49]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.

[00:12:03]What about intelligent life?

[00:12:06]Well, our perfect planet has so many ecosystems and opportunities that it would  probably develop sooner or later.

[00:12:13]Maybe even multiple times at once.

[00:12:16]Imagine a planet where different  alien civilizations exist in parallel, each with their own empires of stone  and wood, maybe metal and silicon.

[00:12:25]How different would their perspective  on living things and the nature of life be?

[00:12:29]Would they try to eradicate each other?

[00:12:32]Respect nature more or less – on a planet where  any wound you cut would be filled up in no time.

[00:12:39]What would they think of our desert planet  with winters and ice, with a few specs of green?

[00:12:44]Would they look at space and say “no thank  you” to planets that are so obviously inferior?

[00:12:50]We don’t know if a planet like Hestia exists.

[00:12:53]But it actually could.

[00:12:55]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.

[00:13:10]Here at Kurzgesagt, we know a thing  or two about helping people learn.

[00:13:14]For instance, for most of human history, the best way to learn something hard was  to learn from someone who already knew it.

[00:13:19]On a perfect planet, every student  would have access to a great tutor.

[00:13:23]But that simply hasn’t been possible.

[00:13:25]Until now.

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[00:13:28]Brilliant just launched a world-class tutor, and his name is Koji.

[00:13:32]Like the best human tutors, Koji  doesn’t just give you answers.

[00:13:35]He guides you to find them yourself.

[00:13:37]You can ask him questions, have him  clarify concepts, or break down problems.

[00:13:42]And when you get stuck,  Koji helps you get unstuck.

[00:13:45]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.

[00:13:53]While other breakthrough technologies simply  think for you, Koji makes you a better thinker.

[00:13:58]Brilliant is already our favorite way to learn.

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[00:14:15]A perfect planet gives life  the conditions to emerge.

[00:14:19]Brilliant gives minds the conditions to flourish.

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