week after a Delta II rocket launched Kepler into planet-hunting history, Laughlin had quietly posted a strange, half-whimsical equation on his blog systemic, at oklo.org. In a series of subsequent posts, he explained how the long string of obscure variables and weighted functions could be used to crudely quantify the value of any terrestrial exoplanets that Kepler and the handful of other leading surveys might soon discover. It was, he said, an attempt to judge whether any particular “Earth-like” world was worthy of legitimate scientific excitement, independent of media hype. After plugging in a few key parameters—such as a planet’s mass, its estimated temperature, and the age and type of its star—Laughlin’s equation would generate a value, inU.S. dollars, that could be assigned to that particular world. Small, rocky worlds in clement orbits around middle-aged, middle-of-the-road stars similar to the Sun merited the highest values, as those planets presumably offered the best chance for harboring complex biospheres that could eventually be detected by future space telescopes. For a planet to be worthy of wide attention, Laughlin opined, it would need to at least break the million-dollar mark.
Laughlin drew his economic baselines from simple math, dividing Kepler’s federally funded $600 million price tag by 100, a conservative estimate of how many terrestrial planets the space telescope would discover during its lifetime. If such planets could be considered commodities, the math suggested that the 2009 market price, as determined by U.S. taxpayers, could be set at $6 million per world—a value that could drop over time if small rocky planets began to overflow astronomers’ coffers. If, however, Kepler found a terrestrial world in the middle of a Sun-like star’s habitable zone, Laughlin’s test runs suggested such a planet’s value could exceed $30 million in his equation. Zarmina’s World, if it existed, garnered a value of around $60,000. GJ 667Cc was worth even less. According to Laughlin’s calculations, Kepler’s first million-dollar candidates appeared in February 2012. Several more would follow, bearing names such as Kepler-62f and Kepler-69c, until the Kepler spacecraft suffered a crippling malfunction in May of 2013 that all but ended its primary mission.
The cleverest part of Laughlin’s valuation equation was its treatment of a planet’s home star, which allowed his numerical scrutiny to be extended to the worlds in our own solar system. Photons, not dollars, are a planet hunter’s fundamental currency, as they are what allow a planet to be not only detected but also subsequently characterized. Generally speaking, the more photons astronomers can gather from an exoplanetary system, the more they can learn about it. Stars and planets nearer to our solar system are brighter in our skies due to their close proximity, and hence more valuable, providing floods of useful photons where more distant objects would only offer trickles. This facetwas why so many of Kepler’s small planets would struggle to reach a valuation of even a million dollars: the Kepler field stars were far away, and thus very dim. The brightest star visible in the solar system by many orders of magnitude is, of course, the Sun, which has the capacity to send local planetary valuations into truly astronomical territory.
Based on the early-twentieth-century notion of Venus’s clouds as reflective shielding against the potent solar flux, Laughlin’s equation pegged the planet’s value at one and a half quadrillion dollars—$1,500 trillion. Evaluating Venus based on its actual runaway-greenhouse surface temperature gave the planet a value of a trillionth of one cent. Laughlin sometimes compared such discrepancies in planets’ values to the dot-com stock bubble of the mid- to late-1990s, when companies leveraged investors’ irrational exuberance into billion-dollar valuations, only to crater when the bubble collapsed and
Laughlin drew his economic baselines from simple math, dividing Kepler’s federally funded $600 million price tag by 100, a conservative estimate of how many terrestrial planets the space telescope would discover during its lifetime. If such planets could be considered commodities, the math suggested that the 2009 market price, as determined by U.S. taxpayers, could be set at $6 million per world—a value that could drop over time if small rocky planets began to overflow astronomers’ coffers. If, however, Kepler found a terrestrial world in the middle of a Sun-like star’s habitable zone, Laughlin’s test runs suggested such a planet’s value could exceed $30 million in his equation. Zarmina’s World, if it existed, garnered a value of around $60,000. GJ 667Cc was worth even less. According to Laughlin’s calculations, Kepler’s first million-dollar candidates appeared in February 2012. Several more would follow, bearing names such as Kepler-62f and Kepler-69c, until the Kepler spacecraft suffered a crippling malfunction in May of 2013 that all but ended its primary mission.
The cleverest part of Laughlin’s valuation equation was its treatment of a planet’s home star, which allowed his numerical scrutiny to be extended to the worlds in our own solar system. Photons, not dollars, are a planet hunter’s fundamental currency, as they are what allow a planet to be not only detected but also subsequently characterized. Generally speaking, the more photons astronomers can gather from an exoplanetary system, the more they can learn about it. Stars and planets nearer to our solar system are brighter in our skies due to their close proximity, and hence more valuable, providing floods of useful photons where more distant objects would only offer trickles. This facetwas why so many of Kepler’s small planets would struggle to reach a valuation of even a million dollars: the Kepler field stars were far away, and thus very dim. The brightest star visible in the solar system by many orders of magnitude is, of course, the Sun, which has the capacity to send local planetary valuations into truly astronomical territory.
Based on the early-twentieth-century notion of Venus’s clouds as reflective shielding against the potent solar flux, Laughlin’s equation pegged the planet’s value at one and a half quadrillion dollars—$1,500 trillion. Evaluating Venus based on its actual runaway-greenhouse surface temperature gave the planet a value of a trillionth of one cent. Laughlin sometimes compared such discrepancies in planets’ values to the dot-com stock bubble of the mid- to late-1990s, when companies leveraged investors’ irrational exuberance into billion-dollar valuations, only to crater when the bubble collapsed and
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