If you believe some people, everything in this world has a price. Now the world has a price as well. Our planet is worth $4,800 trillion according to University of California-Santa Cruz Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin. Professor Laughlin developed the value for NASA. He came up with the figure by calculating the sum of the planet’s age, size, temperature, mass and other vital statistics.
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 essentially shows whether planets are worth studying, stating that anything worth less than $97 million just isn’t worth the hassle.
There are about 1,235 other planets in the universe, most of which weren’t given a high price tag because of their inhospitable climates. According to the Daily Mail, Mars is worth only $16,361 and Venus is worth less than a penny. Prior to Dr. Laughlin’s work, most Earth-like world known to scientists, was the exoplanet Gilese 581 c but the professor’s equationsaid it was worth 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.
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.
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?
