How Much Is A Planet Worth?

KOTTKE DOT ORG KOTTKE DOT ORG MENU Member Login

• Home
• Membership
• Newsletter
• Goods
• Archive + Tags
• About/Contact

dark mode light mode Advertise here with Carbon Ads

Socials & More

• Newsletter
• RSS Feed
• Bluesky
• Mastodon

This site is made possible by member support. 💞

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

Beloved by 86.47% of the web.

🍔 💀 📸 😭 🕳️ 🤠 🎬 🥔

× close posted Feb 4 @ 11:47 AM by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

How much is a planet worth?

Over at Boing Boing, Lee Billings has an interview with Greg Laughlin, an astrophysicist who recently came up with an equation for estimating the value of planets, a sort of Drake equation for cosmic economics.

This equation’s initial purpose, he wrote, was to put meaningful prices on the terrestrial exoplanets that Kepler was bound to discover. But he soon found it could be used equally well to place any planet-even our own-in a context that was simultaneously cosmic and commercial. In essence, you feed Laughlin’s equation some key parameters — a planet’s mass, its estimated temperature, and the age, type, and apparent brightness of its star — and out pops a number that should, Laughlin says, equate to cold, hard cash.

At the time, the exoplanet Gliese 581 c was thought to be the most Earth-like world known beyond our solar system. The equation said it was worth a measly $160. Mars fared better, priced at $14,000. And Earth? Our planet’s value emerged as nearly 5 quadrillion dollars. That’s about 100 times Earth’s yearly GDP, and perhaps, Laughlin thought, not a bad ballpark estimate for the total economic value of our world and the technological civilization it supports.

• astronomy
• Greg Laughlin
• interviews
• Lee Billings
• mathematics
• physics
• science

Share