We’ve always done that. Everybody knows our hemisphere is prettier and sexier than theirs. We’ve got the hottest hemisphere on the planet, and that includes whether you break it up North/South, or East/West. We own it, baby.

It’s an artist’s impression. We almost certainly got no idea what its continents look like at that distance.

Beyond what’s been said already, we 100% do not have any way to take a picture of a planet outside our solar system that shows any detail of the planet’s surface, and no plans to make a telescope that can do that. What we do right now to even tell if there are planets around other starts is look at the star’s light and see if it gets slightly darker on regular intervals, indicating that a planet is crossing between us and the star in a regular orbit. Right now we can barely take a decent picture of Pluto, which is in our solar system. And checking the light brightness is really only good for looking for large planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn.

It’s like seeing a car at night on a mountainside 4 miles away with its headlights on. It’s just sitting there and you are wondering if it’s a car or something else. It’s hard to even tell it’s 2 lights, it just looks like one light from that distance. But what would we see if someone walked in front of the car with the headlights on? The light get dim on one side and bright again, then dim and bright again on the other side. Sort of the same thing.

As for the uncanny valley part, it’s because whoever came up with the graphic just did a random splash of water and land. The planet could be orange and magenta-colored, we have no idea. They used colors familiar to us looking at images of Earth because the intent is to make you think “it’s like Earth, but different.”

You’ve only ever seen photographs of one planet with oceans and landmasses, and that’s Earth. The only other celestial body that has a solid surface with liquid on it that we’ve taken pictures of is Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan has a thick opaque atmosphere so we don’t have true-to-life pictures of the surface from space. We’ve got images constructed from radar scans, and this amazing image taken from the surface by the Huygens probe that hitched a ride with Cassini. The hydrocarbon lakes of Titan look like…blobs on a circle.

Every other planetary surface you’ve seen is rocky dirt, icy dirt, straight-up ice, cratery dirt, or opaque gas clouds. Any “earth-like” planet you’ve ever seen is a fictional artist’s conception. And ain’t no human artist who knows shit about plate tectonics compared to the Earth herself, so they draw weird shit that ain’t quite right somehow.

I think in part because speculating what the land looks like on an alien planet is actually really hard to do, and the vast majority of artists just wing it. With sufficient planning and rigor, alien planets should look normal.

For instance, I think the landmass of Tira-292b looks pretty natural. It’s a hypothetical planet created for the Alien Biospheres project, a YouTube series that tries to build up an alien ecosystem as accurately to science as reasonably possible

It’s a seriously underrated series, I highly recommend everyone check it out

I get the same feeling when looking at fractals.

On one hand I want to explore everything but at the same time I know it’s impossible to grasp.

Our own Earth has fixing points from man made stuff, so I sort of know what’s where, but then I zoom in on the archipelagos in south Chile or the lakes in Lapland and I get confused again because it seems soo randomly generated.

Or they just approach from this angle and go “Ah, nothing here” and move on

How dare you shit talk Pangea like that

I think the point is that they aren’t assuming the planet in question is tectonically activie, as that’s one of the unlikely steps needed for life as we know it.

Maybe if they make a seafaring DLC (though that is kind of a step back after doing literal space ships).

Unless I’m mistaken, you can really do anything in the water tiles in Rimworld

That show had so much potential as true high sci-fi and it was completely wasted

Soon, though, using gravitational lensing of the sun. Sometime around 2035 maybe.

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.

lol. All those flyby probes we’ve sent to other planets in the system and we could’ve just pointed our interstellar telescope instead and looked for puddles.

These are always illustrations based on whatever data we could gather. We almost never “see” the planets themselves.

You know that picture we have of the milky way?

There are not enough fidly-bits on this new planet

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.

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.

Will you enjoy anything our universe shows you? Are there things that bring you joy in life? Will you touch grass? What about filling the void in your heart with wonder instead of worry?