You can Build Your Own Earth 2.0 with the Awesome Website ‘Earth-like’
A new website allows you to experiment with Earth-like planets.
By Nola Taylor Redd

April 3, 2020 | You can now build your very own Earth 2.0! A new website allows users to create an Earth-like planet with a wide selection of options in an effort to demonstrate how many of the new exoplanets lauded as “Earth-like” may not resemble our planet at all. The researchers behind this website hope to clear up some of the confusion about what the phrase “Earth-like” really means.

“It is very tempting to think that an Earth-sized planet is like our habitable Earth,” Kana Ishimaru, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, told Space.com in an email. “But changing only one property of the planet can affect the environment significantly.”

A land-locked planet created by the Earth-like project. (Image credit: Earth-Like)

Ishimaru lead the development of the website “Earth-like” and the Twitterbot of the same name while she was an undergraduate student at the University of Tokyo. Within the website, users can manipulate factors including the land-fraction and volcanism of the planet and where it lies within the habitable zone, the distance from a star where liquid water can remain on the surface. These small shifts can dramatically affect the environments on the surface of a planet.