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Re:Earth-like planet discovered by jerf on Thursday July 23, 2015 @02:01AM (#9934239)
For sufficiently vague definitions of Earth. For the definitions being used in most of these sensationalized stories we've already got 2 more we know about, Venus and Mars, and I'm pretty sure if Mercury was picked up in another solar system we'd hear it described as "Earth-like" too, given some of the stuff that has been described that way. The "Earth-like" idea has been debased to uselessness in press releases like this.

Unless they announce that spectroscopy has revealed a lot of O2 in an atmosphere, at this point I'm primed to be pretty underwhelmed.

(And to be clear, I am specifically complaining about the debasing of the term "Earth-like" for PR purposes. The science and discoveries are as incredible as ever, no matter what garbage PR terms are used to describe them in process releases.)

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