accompanied by Jupiter-sized planets in circular orbits in order to clean out the asteroids and debris that can destroy life. So we have to reduce the number of Earth-like planets to only those that have Jupiter-sized neighbors. Earth-like planets also have to be accompanied by large moons in order to stabilize their spin, or else they will eventually wobble and even flip over after millions of years. (If the moon were tiny, like an asteroid, then small perturbations in the Earth’s spin would gradually build up over the aeons, according to Newton’s laws, and the Earth might eventually flip
...more

