Living Worlds

In 2013, a group of scientists sat down to redraw the habitable zone using better physics and better data, and when they finished, something unsettling had happened. Earth, our one confirmed living planet, was suddenly right at the edge. This episode is about what happens when a "settled" scientific concept gets unsettled. And about a second finding, hiding in the same recalculation, that quietly changed the question the field was really asking. Have the skill but not the path into research? Rakiura puts you in a working lab, on a real problem picked by someone who knows what's tractable, with a group around you. Apply → https://www.rakiura.co

Three rocky planets orbit our Sun in the region where liquid water could exist, but only one of them is alive. For fifty years, astronomers have chased a single elegant idea about what makes a world habitable, a range of distances from a star where the temperature is just right. In this episode, we trace the "habitable zone" from a thought experiment to the calculation that still defines the field today, and find a warning hiding in plain sight. Even the scientists who built the concept knew it wasn't quite the answer everyone thinks it is. Have the skill but not the path into research? Rakiura puts you in a working lab, on a real problem picked by someone who knows what's tractable, with a group around you. Apply → https://www.rakiura.co