This last weekend Steve Delahoyde read this piece at the Paper Machete and he is kindly letting me let me share it here with you:

This week, while you were inexplicably and simultaneously distracted by insurance websites and slutty costumes, the known universe expanded ever so slightly with the announced discovery of Kepler 78b. The New York Times, reporting on the planet's find, originally released in the science journal Nature, write the breathless, life-altering, religion-upheaving headline: "Astronomers Find Earth-like Planet..."

...and once again, we, the ignorant dupes that we are, are duped by science, journalism, and our own hopes and dreams.

To be fair, the full Times headline reads "Astronomers Find Earthlike Planet, But It's Infernally Hot," because that's what Kepler 78b is: infernally hot. It orbits around its sun every 8 1/2 hours, as opposed to our 365 days, and because it's so close to a flaming ball of fire, its surface temperature is somewhere in the range of "3,500 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit." Andrew Howard, who was the lead author of one of the papers published by Nature, tells the Times, "This is probably one of the most hellish planets that have been discovered yet."

So how exactly is this "earth-like?" Things seem fairly stable here. None of us are catching on fire, the ground isn't molten lava, we aren't dizzy from zipping around the sun all the damn time.

Here's the issue: any comparison, be it "Astronomers Find an Earthlike Planet" or Nature's simple, almost non-headline: "Earth-Sized Planet with an Earth-Like Density", immediately gets ours hopes up. We're playing loose with our use of "-like".

Earth-like! My god! They've found a second earth! There's life on other planets! What does this mean?! This changes everything!

Instead, what's essentially being reported is similar to a headline that might read "Car-Like Object Found in Desert!" You wonder, "Hey, wow, what is it? Some sort of car out there in the desert? Something prehistoric?" And then you read more and, "ehh... it was just this kinda big, heavy rock that sorta looked like a car. Uh, it weighed about the same as a car though. So..."

That's disappointing. And maybe that car rock was super interesting, but now we feel let down and our brains are shutting down. And with all of these Earth-like reports, we've been repeatedly heartbroken.

In early October, we read excited headlines about finding an "earth-like" planet with water, WATER! People, that's one of the very building blocks of life and...no, wait, that one was destroyed a million billion years ago and now we're only seeing remnants of whatever planet that was, now swirling and sloshing around a white dwarf.

There was Keppler22b two years ago. "Meet the New Possible Earth-Like Planet", the Atlantic tells us. NASA writes, "NASA's Kepler [Telescope] Confirms Its First Planet in the Habitable Zone." The habitable zone?! Well that sounds downright habitable!

Days after that official announced discovery, Yahoo blogger Mark Whittington asks, "How and When Could We Visit Kepler 22B?" Shit! You mean we're already thinking of setting up shop there? Breathless is the only way to describe it! This is life-altering. It's religion-upheaving!

But no, despite NASA's dedication to keep looking for life on 22b, the planet "is likely to have a more volatile-rich composition with a liquid or gaseous outer shell." So sure it might have life or creatures or whatever hanging around on it, but it's probably more likely to be made entirely out of poison water. Though hey, it does have a sort of Earth-like orbit around its sun, so... there's something that isn't exciting.

Along with Mars, which supplanted the Moon as Earth's number one prick tease for finding life out there, the Kepler telescope has beamed back more that 200 of these Earth-ish finds since its launch in 2009. And with a profession where discoveries are often overlooked and budgets are forever being slashed, you certainly feel sympathy for NASA and science in general, for trying to drum up excitement about each of these finds, which are interesting in and of themselves. But adding that thin juicy layer of space buccaneer, alien-hunting, "Earth-like" craftiness? Meh.

Some amount of pity for the journalists as well, who are merely doing as journalists have been doing from the start: writing a solid headline in hopes of making you want to read the rest of the damn thing.

However, if journalists started publishing stories like, "Kim Kardashian-Like Woman Spotted Eating Garbage on Roadway", because of course they'd seen a crazy person eating garbage on the side of the road, but one who technically weighs roughly the same as the celebrity, and lives in the Western hemisphere, and has hair, well, there would be riots in the streets.

What's more, if the public begins to doubt science reporting with these less than forthright headlines, we run the risk of missing other important finds. For instance, this week alone, from other scientific disciplines, there were three stories that were overshadowed by this super-hot non-Earth-like planet.

Number one: "Scientists Publish Stack of New Information on Little-Studied Flying Fox Bat." Not only is there something out there flying around that's possibly part fox and possibly part bat, scientists have whole stack worth of shit on the little bugger.

Second, the headline reads, "Snakes On the Brain: Are Primates Hard-Wired to Recognize Snakes?" The answer, of course, is probably a two-parter: 1) yes and 2) awesome, everyone is inherently Indiana Jones.

Third, Science Daily reports, "Monkey That Purrs Like a Cat Is Among New Species Discovered in Amazon Rainforest." A goddamn monkey that's out there purring like a cat, probably freaking out about snakes, and that story received not a mention in the New York Times, the Atlantic, nor the Wall Street Journal.

The Huffington Post, however, was all over the purring monkey.

Listen, we all want to know what's out there, and we definitely want there to be something, because thinking about it just being us makes the whole business of space just too damn big. It's a powerful emotion, that fear of being alone, and it's at the core of everything we do and think and say and act. And to flick at that feeling in order to share something that isn't immediately addressing that fear, well, that feels cheap.

Instead, unless we really, really mean it, we suggest that we stop using all of these "Earth-like" headlines and instead go with something still catchy, just more honest. For this week's find of Kepler 78b, maybe something like, "Raging Ball of Unrelenting, Face-Melting Fire Discovered by Peeping Tom Telescope."

That should hook 'em just fine.