• Question: is there any possible way to create another earth and if so how

    Asked by ailbhewoo to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Christian Wirtz

      Christian Wirtz answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      Hi Ailbhe,

      not for humans! The pure scale of the thing would be far beyond what we can do and where would we take the material from? Catching asteroids would take a while.
      We have however discovered lots and lots of other planets out there, some of which may be able to support life. It seems that most stars have at least a few planets around them and when you look at all the stars in the sky I think we can safely say that the chances are quite good for one of them to have an earth-like planet around them. It will of course not be exactly like earth as each planet is, like every human, unique. There are simply too many things that could be different (and if it’s just the number of water drops in the ocean).
      So I think we can say that the universe is capable of making something very close which I suppose is kind of a “yes”.

    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Hmm, this is a cool question.

      How could we do it!

      Planets are made from the rocks and dust that are left over, floating about a star as it finished forming. So what we’d need to do is get a load of rocks from the solar system and smush them together. It might take all of the asteroids we have…or we could just use another planet like Mars.

      Changing a planet to be like Earth is called terraforming. Mars and Venus are both close enough to the Sun, but there are loads of problems to fix first. Mars’ gravity is too low and Venus rotates really slowly. A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus! You’d have two birthdays in one day!

      Scientists aren’t sure how to fix these problems yet, but there are plenty of groups out there working on it

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