A Major Correction
Editor’s Note: This article is part of the series “What Is the Best Planet?”
Last October, The Atlantic published, “Jupiter Is the Best Planet,” an article by Adrienne LaFrance. As editor of that article, I must take responsibility for the way it misled readers. In cases like this, we usually append a correction to the original article, but here the error is so grave that a freestanding editorial mea culpa is required. Jupiter is not, as LaFrance asserts, the best planet.
That honor rightly belongs to Saturn.
LaFrance was right to choose from the outer planets. With the exception of Earth (off-limits in this exercise) the inner planets are a bore. Mercury is a tiny thing, sun-blasted and crater-pocked, more moon than planet. Venus glows lovely in the sky, but its atmosphere is a hellish, sulfur-smelling place, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Probes sent to its surface survive less than an hour before succumbing to the extreme conditions. Venus is useful only as a cautionary tale about the runaway greenhouse effect.
We are told that Mars was once a blue marble, coated in oceans and swirling white clouds. But today it’s a rusting, dried-out husk,
