What is the most Earth-like Earth-like world?

So I am currently exploring the far-flung reaches of the Outer Arm, and I stumbled across an un-tagged ELW that is indeed rather Earth-like:

Gravity: 0.85g
Surface temperature: 296K (23C)
Surface pressure: 0.84 atmospheres
Atmospheric composition: 80.0% nitrogen, 18.8% oxygen, 1.2% water

This made me think - what is the most Earth-like Earth-like world found to date? This one is quite close, but some parameters are further from Earth (eg only 0.5241 Earth masses, an orbital period of 1840.3 days (it orbits a type A star) and a rotational period of 1.9 days). Is there some agreed formula for Earth-likeness?
 
Finding a procedurally-generated "perfect match for Earth" is one of my goals in exploration. For me, to qualify as "Earth-matching", it would need to have the following parameters:
  • Mass: 0.90 - 1.10 Earth-masses
  • Gravity: 0.90 - 1.10 standard gravities.
  • Temperature: 286-290 K (because climatologists seem to agree that a 2 degree temperature shift from current-normal would make the planet non-Earth-like).
  • Pressure: 0.90 - 1.10 standard atmospheres
  • Volcanism: silicate magma
  • Day length: 0.9 - 1.1 Earth-days
  • Axial tilt: 15 - 30 degrees (when corrected to a 0 - 90 degree basis).
  • The presence of a single moon or Moon-like object (such as a co-orbiting planet).
I don't consider star type and length of year to be critical parameters, though aesthetically I would consider a planet with two or more suns in the sky to be "not a match for Earth".

It is virtually impossible to find such a world. None are known on EDSM, out of the hundreds of thousands of ELWs found to date. The main areas of difficulty are:

- Getting Mass and Gravity to match. Earth is a very lightweight, fluffy planet compared to most procedurally-generated planets - it has 70% rock, 30% metal. Most HMCs have the ratio more like 65:35. It means that most planets that fall within the mass range have too high a gravity, most planets that fall within the gravity range are too lightweight. There is a small amount of overlap, for planets with mass around 0.90 and gravity 1.08.

- Getting the atmospheric pressure right. The Stellar Forge almost always gives planets with near-Earth-like mass an atmosphere that is way too thick (typically in the 3 to 4 atmospheres range).

To show you an example of the difficulty in hitting the target: here's a plot I made a couple of years ago, showing the gravity and atmospheric pressure of all the Earthlikes then known to EDSM.

SP6qZCZ.jpg


You can see the three "lobes" that the Stellar Forge tends to make: lightweight thin-aired (Group 1, 45%), medium thick-aired (Group 2, 21%) and heavy thin-aired (Group 3, 33%). Only 1% of Earth-likes fall outside of these three Groups. You'll also notice the large void in the plot, around the 1:1 point. There are only about a dozen or so planets that fall within my +/- 10% Earth-matching window on this graph. I've checked them all out on EDSM; they all fail on the temperature range (most are way too cold, a couple are way too hot).

The best-matching planet I have found from EDSM is one where six out of my eight parameters have matched: Planet 3 in the Floawns XO-X d2-1295 system has Earth-matching mass, gravity, temperature, volcanism, day-length and presence-of-a-Moon-like-object. In addition, it is in the "third rock" position with just one sun in the sky. The two non-matching parameters: it has the extra-thick atmosphere typical of Group 2 worlds, and it has a below-par axial tilt. Additional drawbacks are that sun is a super-hot white Class A6, which in turn means the year is super-long. I've also cheated with the "moon", which is actually a distant co-orbiting planet.
 
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The problem with this question is that it's quite subjective. How exactly do you determine how Earth-like a planet is? You need to go with "what is the most Earth-like ELW according to this definition", and even then, when you pick factors to consider, you also need to pick weights for those which are more or less important. Tuning these can be quite arbitrary.

My earlier thoughts on the subject:
IANAB, but as far as I know, that pressure might not be too bad. As long as the body would have enough time to get used to it, it should be perfectly fine. (Internal pressure has to "build up" to that level, and the body has to get used to breathing being a bit harder work.) The most important part isn't atmospheric pressure in itself, nor the oxygen level in the atmosphere, but how the two relate to each other. I believe the partial oxygen pressure that the human body can sustain indefinitely is roughly 0.5 atm, and you can calculate that easily: multiply the oxygen percentage with the atmospheric pressure. However, ED actually already does the calculations for you: if a planet is classified as Earth-like, its atmosphere should be breathable. From what I can tell, the game actually uses pretty conservative ranges for this, so it's not just breathable, but breathable comfortably.
So I'd say that if you're looking for a close analogue to Earth, the atmosphere isn't a very large factor.

Also, I'd say that neither mass nor radius are important in themselves, to anyone living on the planet, but gravity is. You'd want that to be as close to 1g as possible. Low gravity might be better for people born on higher-g worlds, but folks who get used to the new planet's lower gravity (or are born there) will have trouble getting used to other worlds. On the other hand, construction in general would be easier on such planets. On high gravity worlds, it's the other way around: harder to get used to it, but once you do, you'd get a leg up over others on lower gravity worlds, so to speak. Construction would have to be more expensive though. There is one thing, however: we don't know very well about the effects of living on a high gravity world on the human body. Various functions depend on gravity in surprising ways, which we learned from astronauts living in microgravity (aboard space stations) for longer periods of time, and it could well be that living on higher gravity than Earth's would cause unforeseen problems too.
Of course, I'd imagine that in Elite's universe, some light genetic engineering could fix those.

Moving on to other stuff: having a rotational period as close to Earth's (23h56m) would also be very preferable for new colonists. On the other hand, the length of the year and the axial tilt pretty much only influence seasons, which are far easier to adopt to than very different day lengths. Especially considering that moving to various latitudes on the planet are also an option. I've seen plenty of ELW-s where I'm fairly certain that living near the equator would be very difficult, if nearly impossible (without environmental suits, that is), but that doesn't mean that colonists couldn't just go live at higher latitudes comfortably.


So, to sum things up, I'd say the following are the most important:
  • Gravity (it's global)
  • Rotational period (difficult to get used to!)
Moderately important:
  • Temperature (colonists can move to different areas to find comfortable climates)
  • Volcanism (not for indigenous life, since we're talking about colonists, but you'd probably want volcanic rock layers, minerals etc)
  • Axial tilt (you don't need seasons per se)
  • Orbital period (would mostly be noticed through the seasons anyway)
Not important:
  • Other orbital parameters (eccentricity, inclination, semi-major axis, argument of periapsis)
  • Surface composition
  • Radius (it's nice to have a larger surface area though)
  • Atmospheric pressure and composition (the Stellar Forge makes sure it's comfortably breathable)
If you wanted to have the closeness to Earth as a single numerical value that's a function of the above, then they should be weighed.

But, as MattG said way back in the same thread, the Forge probably can't produce an exact replica of Earth: it can't do the 70%/30% rock/metal split, and different ones than those will produce a different density, which in turn will make sure that both radius and mass together can't match Earth's.

So, the best you can do is to quantify things, measure the differences and come up with weights to see which ones are more or less important, then calculate a score on all the ELWs you want.
Back then, I made something for this - which AFAIK nobody else ever used - you can see how it would work here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19bXzw7N4_2QKISF0eAnFz6Gz2a_O4GJiw0ttfFBfKW0/edit?usp=sharing
If you ran this on all the ELWs from EDSM, you'd get an answer for exactly which ELW is the most Earth-like... according to this definition.
 
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