Because one of them (Earth) is based on reality, and the other is a poorly done conceptual render because no human actually knows the shape of the landmasses on that planet on account of having never been there.
Have they considered zooming their telescope in enough until they can see for themselves firsthand?
I know you're probably joking but even the best telescopes can only directly image a planet that's like 10 times the mass of Jupiter and even then it's only like two pixels.
Bro that's a PRIME sailing planet if I've ever seen on.
Earths oceans shores are largely extremely boring linear beaches. Especially along the Atlantic.
This plant would be prime for small cheap hobby costal sailing
Anybody by chance know if there’s a Kepler-452b map for Civ V?
It also bigger, what means stronger gravity. And stronger creatures.
But it also means it's harder to reach orbit, and the effects of microgravity would be even more damaging to health.
...because Slartibartfast didn't hand design them like he did for earth?
There are not enough fidly-bits on this new planet
They’d probably like to come colonize our planet, but with 2x the gravity of Earth, I bet it’s hard to build a rocket that can actually get them into space, much less travel 1800 light years.
Fermi paradox solution: aliens approach from a direction where the first part they see is the Philippines and Indonesia, and just say "nah I'm not learning all those names of islands", and leave.
Or they just approach from this angle and go "Ah, nothing here" and move on
They dodged a bullet!
Lazy Aliens.
Where is that?
The water between Asia, Australia, North and South America, and Antarctica.
bro... that's earth man. That's where I live buddy
Pacific Ocean is mad large
Maps are optimized for people who live on land
Because the computer-generated images that symbolize said other planets are generally done with some shitty-shit stupid noise algorithm to generate the surface rather than anything decent (well, at least it's not uniform noise), whilst the ones for planet Earth just use existing map data for the Earth surface.
As it so happens I've been working on a game that has planets, so here's an example generated with better algorithms:
PS: also note that for game purposes, the athmosphere is unrealistically thick as a proportion of planetary radius, purelly because it looks better. A lot of choices in game making are mainly artistic freedom which at first people with a Science or Engineering background tend to shy away from "because it's not how things are".
A lot of choices in game making are mainly artistic freedom which at first people with a Science or Engineering background tend to shy away from "because it's not how things are".
This is a chorus I like to repeat: Entertainment doesn't need to be realistic to be fun, and I wish publishers / marketers / reviewers / players would acknowledge that more often and stop slapping the label "realistic" and the like on things that aren't.
There are sims that are grounded in careful study and attempt to model some part of reality as accurately as possible, but even they need to compromise, both to run on contemporary hardware and to balance it against playability. But they're often complex, by virtue of modeling a complex reality, and not everyone's cup of tea.
But then you have things like Assassin's Creed that regularly and heavily fudge history, not always in a bad way, but convey an impression of past societies that seems accurate, but glosses over things like the Spartan inequality and slavery or Viking brutality, painting a more "noble" and "heroic" picture than they each deserve.
Again, there's nothing wrong with making up interesting stuff, but people should be honest about it (as you are). Pointing out those artistic choices is an opportunity for learning things. Though the scale of an atmosphere is probably less significant than the scale of Viking slave trade, I still find it curious just how thin it actually is.
I think it's also that we choose the most photogenic angle for earth, if you pick a random angle of earth it sometimes doesn't look as good.
e.g.
do you have an algorithm for picking a photogenic angle for your game?
Don't worry. If us humans showed up on Kepler-452b tomorrow and it had a breathable atmosphere, those lakes would probably be gone in a few hundred years.
So would the breathable atmosphere.
Yeah. Those astronauts would be super thirsty after that trip
How did they get it to pose next to earth for this photo?
Either a classified SCP phenomenon/entity or a Doctor Who plot.
Kepler-452b was having a private conversation with Australia when the photographer snuck up and got the candid photo.
Unfortunately Kepler-452b was embarrassed by having the intimate moment interrupted and left in a hurry.
Though their conversation was pleasant, the photographer ruined the mood and numbers were not exchanged.
Artists rendering
Documentaries and science communication in general has always been waaaay too fucking lax on properly disclosing artists' renderings. Every field suffers from it, but I have to say astrophysics and astronomy are the absolute worst about it.
Am I the only one around here who doesn’t think it looks like shit?
Geoscentific and ecological implications aside, they have a huge ass continent with multiple giant lakes and small peninsulas all around. With a comparable vegetation to earth, this would look amazing in person, I believe.
Well, if Americans settled on that planet, travel would suck to get around. But if a modern country developed it, it would be great - high speed rail all around!
There's no way in hell we have the resolution to see continents in another star system.
It's called Project Hail Mary you ding dong! We sent someone there in a last ditch effort to save the Earth!
These are always illustrations based on whatever data we could gather. We almost never "see" the planets themselves.
Considering we only know it's there because it slightly dims the light from its star as it crosses during its orbit, you would be correct. At that distance, we would never see light bouncing off the actual planet. Even the star is basically a single pixel. We can estimate its size and orbit based on how quickly it crosses in front of the star and how much the light dims, and using those two numbers we can estimate its distance from Kepler 452.
Are we landmass shaming now?
Earth 2 exists, except it’s twice the size of Earth and could be a scorched wasteland for all we know.
Whenever I see an update on these sort of articles, the planet always ends up being a tide-locked hell-scape full of toxic chemicals.
https://xkcd.com/2202/ moment
They got a lot more land on that planet. The people who live there don't appreciate what they've got like we will, so we deserve it more. Let's go kill them and take it from them.
* slaps sphere *
"You can fit so much Perlin noise on this baby."
As someone who used mapmaking software for decades I agree they all look randomly generated.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
