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Imagine trying to launch a rocket from a planet where the gravity is so intense that your spacecraft would need more fuel than the entire planet's mass just to escape! That's the cosmic burn happening here with K2-18b, a super-Earth exoplanet that's absolutely flexing its gravitational muscles compared to our humble Earth.
The escape velocity on massive planets like K2-18b would be so ridiculously high that any civilization evolving there would be essentially trapped by their planet's gravity well. They'd be scrolling through their alien social media, seeing Earth's cute little rockets, while knowing they're cosmically grounded forever. Talk about the ultimate planetary house arrest! 🚀💪
The physics is brutal - escape velocity increases with the square root of a planet's mass and inversely with its radius. So when your exoplanet is flexing with several times Earth's mass but similar radius? Your rocket equation just goes from "challenging engineering problem" to "mathematically impossible dream."
