A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I CALL IT "NEW NEW CAPRICA": Scientists just¹ started a comprehensive search for planets similar to Earth, and just like that, lickety-Carnegie-split², they found one. It's called Gliese 581g. They found it so fast, in fact, that they're estimating that one out of every ten stars may have an Earth-like planet.³ The conversation went like this:

Smart Person: Let's look for planets!
Other Smart Person: Great idea! I'll get started right aw...
Third Smart Person⁴: Found one!

Some cool things about Gliese 581g, assuming (perhaps overly optimistically) that it has water:

• The same side faces the sun all the time. So everybody can choose to live in the "twilight zone" -- the part of the planet where it's not superhot or supercold, and where it's always basically dusk.
• This would make solar power really efficient.
• It would also mean that you could mow your lawn any time of the day.
• Sentient beings from Gliese 581g would find our alternating day and night terrifying, or downright inconvenient.
• It's three times as big as Earth, so everybody can have a yard.
• It has a 37-day orbit, meaning that the Summer Olympics would happen every 148 days.

Some not great things about Gliese 581g:

• It's three times the mass of earth, so walking up stairs would be murder.
• Might not have water, or might be an uninhabitable planet made of sulphur-smelling gas.

Is it just me, or is your first reaction to learning of a possibly inhabitable planet in a distant solar system, "how soon can I get there?"<sup>5

1</sup>Just" is in astronomical units of time, roughly translating to 10 earth years.
²Astronomy pun.
³Based on a sample size of ten stars surveyed and one Earth-like planet found. Results may not be statistically significant.
⁴After pause of 10 years during which other Smart Persons invented Facebook, Twitter, skinny jeans, Pinkberry, and Plants vs. Zombies.
⁵Approximately 20.5 years, assuming that you are a beam of light; longer if you are not.