Among the Stars is a life we imagined

This year, astronomers discovered a planet about the size of Venus in a star system 40 light years from Earth. This ‘exo-Venus’, known as Gliese 12b, is considered potentially habitable, with an estimated surface temperature of 42C that could, in theory, allow liquid water to flow across its terrain.

It may turn out that this world is openly inhospitable to life in any number of ways, like the majority of the 5,000 exoplanets scientists have discovered so far. But for now, this exo-Venus remains open to possibility – a perfect canvas to imagine whether humans might ever reach such a world, what kind of communities we could build if we do, and whether we should even embark on such an endeavour in the first place.

“Exoplanets are the basis for a lot of science fiction, so a lot of imagining has already been done,” says Larissa Palethorpe, a PhD student studying astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh,