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Q&A

Designing a super-comfortable Earth analog

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Being an engineer and someone who hates hot summers and frigid winters, and someone who really likes the Rocky Mountain view, I can not help but wonder if we humans could get to design a whole new planet instead of just accepting preexisting ones, and our object being designing a planet that hosts about 1~2 billion people with nearly 100% of the landmass looking like the best part of the US, e.g. California or Montana, what would be the appropriate design procedure? For example, given the following constraints (These applies to every square inch of the new planet's land mass, excluding very high mountain ranges positioned strategically to intercept moisture)

  • Surface gravity exactly 1g.
  • Surface air pressure exactly 1atm, air composition 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, water vapor varies according to weather.
  • Day exactly 24 hours, year exactly 365 days, no leap year funny business.
  • Distinct 4 seasons, with minimum temperature no lower than -10 Celsius, maximum temperature no higher than 25 Celsius.
  • Yearly precipitation ~1000mm, with no less than 300mm in winter.
  • No hurricane, no tornado, maximum airspeed with respect to the ground within 20 m/s within the first 10 km from the ground up.
  • Tectonic activities to combat weathering but no changing landscape, no earthquakes, no continental drift to distort landmass shape, no volcanos.
  • Lime rock or granite bedrock, aquifer layer around planet underground within 50m from the surface.

and if I throw in some non-quantitative request such as fertile soil, good mountain view, good beach, plenty of seafood around the shore, is there a possible rough outline of how to decide all the factors?

For example, the stable year and day length may require a moon, a small inner planet and a massive outer gas giant to stabilize the orbit, axial tilt, and rotation speed in billions of years, although the initial value of these can be set arbitrarily. The landmass distribution and the seafloor shape may determine the ocean current flow pattern, precipitation and wet greenhouse effect and how much cloud there is, the mantle and crust composition and dynamics may influence tectonic activities, the temperature, precipitation and tectonic activities ultimately decides whether the carbon cycle is stable and at which level it is, even the amount of thunderstorm lightning might have an influence on how much nitrogen is converted to natural fertilizer and thus the stability of the ecosphere. That's a lot of numerical characteristics determined by just a few free variables.

The planet can be bigger or smaller than earth, the distribution of landmass, and the associated altitude is completely free, although for a reasonable assumption say the total distance variation from the gravity center to any point on the surface should be within 2% of the mean planetary radius.


Think of the planet as an intricate clockwork with gravitational potential as its spring. When the planet is pristine, the spring is wound to the tightest. Over the years the spring unwinds, the little brass bearing of its tiny gears wear out, its metal grows fatigue with each acceleration and deceleration of the second hand, but the clock always shows the correct time with a very narrow margin. That's what I'm asking similar of a planet, a correct design that ages correctly, instead of Earth, which is clock that shows the noon to be noon now and midnight to be midnight as of this moment, but will show noon to be midnight and midnight noon a mere couple of hundreds of millions years from now on, because its internal gears is gradually knocked out of place by its own force.


If the planet's spin is slowed by constant rubbing of wind and sea, maybe the other bodies in the system could constantly replenish the Earth analog's angular momentum by giving up some of their own?

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/142414. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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