S
ome people believe – everything in this world has a price. Now the world has a price as well. Earth is worth $4,800 trillion according to UC-Santa Cruz Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin. Professor Laughlin developed the value for NASA to evaluate the discoveries made by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. He came up with the figure by calculating the sum of the planet’s age, size, temperature, mass and other vital statistics.
What planets are worth studying
Professor Laughlin told the UK’s Daily Mail , “I’ve just always thought that the concept of an ‘Earth-like planet in the habitable zone’ was pretty vaguely defined, and I wanted a metric that I could plug a planet into to see whether its value was high enough to warrant media hype.” The professor’s equation shows whether planets are worth studying, anything worth less than $97 million just isn’t worth the hassle. The astrophysicist told the Daily Mail, “The formula makes you realize just how precious Earth is and I hope it will help us as a society safeguard what we have.”
Earth’s competition
There are about 1,235 known similar planets in the universe. Most planets weren’t given a high price tag because of their inhospitable climates. The Daily Mail says Mars is worth only $16,361 and Venus is worth less than a penny. Prior to Dr. Laughlin’s work, the most Earth-like world known to scientists, was the exoplanet Gilese 581 c. However, the professor’s equation valued it at just $160.
The next Earth-ly object, KOI 326.01 is worth $223,099.93 (KOI stands for “Kepler Object of Interest”). “This is just a way for me to be able to quantify how excited I should be about any particular planet,” he told TechEye.
rb-
I wonder if the professor discounted the value of planet Earth as damaged goods as British Petroleum destroys the Gulf of Mexico and nuclear reactors melt-down in Japan, etc..
What do you think?
How do you value planet Earth?
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.