This article is an adapted excerpt from the upcoming book, "The Life of Super-Earths," available on January 23 from Basic Books.
We love our planet Earth. We should — it is our home, and there’s no place like home. There can’t ever be a better place than Earth. Plenty of serious science literature supports that view in an emotionally detached manner. It is often called the “Goldilocks hypothesis”: the Earth is just the right size (not too big, not too small) and just the right temperature (not too hot, not too cold) for life to emerge here. Life is a rare thing. Perched on our little planet, we can’t see any other out there, or at least not yet — so a certain dose of Earth-centrism seems justified. Or is it?
To read more, click here.