Make room, earthling.
We’re moving the other planets
in our Solar System
into our planetary neck of the woods.
Liquid water is a key ingredient for life.
And in our Solar System,
Earth is the only planet with liquid water
on its surface.
That’s because our planet is located
in the habitable zone of our Sun.
Also known as the Goldilocks zone.
And the conditions here are just right.
Any closer, and water would boil away.
Any further, it would freeze.
The size of this area
depends on how hot or cool a star is.
Scientists have discovered 4,000 exoplanets within habitable zones.
Only 24 of them might be able to support life.
In our Solar System,
this zone is within a range of 0.9 to 1.2 AU from the Sun.
So if we parked all the other planets
within this 45 million km (30 million mi) patch of real estate,
could we kickstart extraterrestrial life?
Hey, I don't know about extraterrestrial life, but my life sure needs some changes this year.
But did you know 80% of the New Year's resolutions get abandoned in the first two months?
Well, that won't happen to me because I am now using Fabulous.
Fabulous is an award-winning app that breaks down healthy habits into small tasks that I can easily achieve.
Whether I want to work out more, increase productivity or find time to read,
Fabulous helps create routines for habits meant to change behavior and keep you motivated throughout your life.
There's no shortcut here, just a Fabulous and proven way to begin your guided journey to success.
And if you still think you don't know where to start, Fabulous has you covered.
They offer guided habit tracking with daily coaching sessions to help you get your day started and unwind in the evening.
You're never on this path alone.
And the first 100 people who visit the link below will get 25% off a premium subscription.
So begin your new routine today and visit THE FAB DOT C O SLASH WHAT IF.
Take advantage of this offer and start creating healthy habits to make your resolutions last all year.
As you're about to see, changing your life is one thing, but making life from nothing, might be even tougher.
With eight planets to squeeze in the Goldilocks zone,
you’d need to get creative.
The last thing you’d want to do would be
disrupt the conditions for life on Earth, right?
Well, to start this scenario off, you'd need to move Mercury
to the innermost portion of the habitable zone.
At around 0.9 AU,
that would be more than twice as far away from the Sun as Mercury orbits now.
Not much would change on this rocky planet,
except for a refreshing coolness
after billions of years of scorching hot temperatures.
Venus already orbits relatively close to the habitable zone at 0.72 AU.
When our Sun was a young star and dimmer,
Venus was essentially located in a habitable zone.
It could even have had conditions for life
with a shallow ocean of its own.
But as the Sun got hotter,
that Goldilocks zone was pushed further back.
Temperatures increased
and the oceans boiled away.
Maybe re-locating Venus to a cooler spot away from the Sun
could make it habitable once again.
Now, it would be time to do some calculating.
You’ve got five more planets to squeeze in.
It could be a good idea to make sure
all the planets are an equal distance apart.
With our narrow Goldilocks zone,
you could place each planet 6.5 million km (4 million mi) from the other.
That would be equal to about 30 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Moving us away from our current location
would make this whole experiment a little less chaotic.
But at about 0.97 AU,
things would get warmer here.
Bad news for the climate crisis.
Ignoring that for now,
you’d move on to Mars.
You’d be excited to see if this cold, rocky planet could have life.
Sorry to say it would still be barren.
Liquid water isn't the only thing that life needs to thrive.
Mars lacks a magnetic field.
That means solar radiation
would strip away the chances of it having an atmosphere.
You’d still have to terraform it.
You’d likely not see any life
popping up on the remaining gaseous planets either.
The gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn,
have atmospheric pressures and temperatures
far too intense for molecules like DNA to be stable.
But you could probably take a cold dip
on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa.
Its new proximity to the Sun
would allow its thick ice layer to melt.
Feeling refreshed,
you’d realize that the last planet in our Solar System, Neptune,
is now even closer to us than Mars is today.
That means in our new Solar System arrangement,
planet-hopping would be a reasonable adventure.
Even with current technology,
you could travel between the planets in 90 days.
And beyond the exploration,
there are all kinds of resources you could extract from the other planets.
You could get hydrogen fuel from Jupiter and Saturn
to help us transition to a low-carbon future.
You could mine cobalt from asteroids.
This would be important to developing renewable energy systems.
But this new Solar System
would be a little unstable, to say the least.
Especially with a massive planet like Jupiter so close to us.
It has two and a half times the mass
of all the other planets in our Solar System combined.
Scientific reports indicate a star similar to our Sun
could have six Earth-sized planets within its habitable zone.
With Jupiter, gravitational stability would be all out of whack.
And all these imbalances could result in the planets or moons
getting ejected from orbit
or reshuffled completely.
Maybe you’d end up with a messy new order of planets.
And life on Earth facing extinction.
But that’s a story for another WHAT IF.