Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester.
This artist’s view shows the hot Jupiter exoplanet 51 Pegasi b, sometimes referred to as Bellerophon, which orbits a star about 50 light-years from Earth in the northern constellation of Pegasus . 51 Pegasi b, discovered in 1995, was the first exoplanet ever found orbiting around a normal star.
Puranen's team then characterized each fictional planet according to nine variables and then applied a Bayesian network to these variables, looking for trends. "For example, we have one variable that is whether the planet first appeared in fiction before or after the discovery of real exoplanets, and another variable of whether the exoplanet hosts intelligent native life or not," said Puranen."These have a negative influence, which means that after the discovery of real exoplanets we've seen fewer fictional exoplanets that have native intelligent life.
Other trends included a cluster of variables — the presence of life, of intelligence, of a planet in the habitable zone with air that an established population of non-native humans can breathe — that all have positive links between them in the Bayesian network. These describe Earth-like worlds in fiction.
For example, despite how sf is changing to reflect real exoplanet discoveries, the purpose of fictional planets is first and foremost to help tell a story. Often that requires a planet on which our heroes can have adventures, and hence that means there is a bias towards a higher proportion of habitable worlds in the sf universe than there is in the real population of known exoplanets. However, without a scientific background, readers and watchers of sf may be unaware that this is the case.
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