A likely new dwarf planet beyond Pluto: what the Rubin Observatory found, and what it does and does not change for my odds

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I want to leave the planet before I die, and the odds this site works out depend on seven kinds of things going right, from cheap launch to a seat for me. None of the seven is "we find a new world past Pluto". So this post moves nothing. I am writing it because this site is also a place to keep up with what is being found in our own solar system, and this week something was.

What was found

On October 27th, 2026 the Rubin Observatory, a new survey telescope in Chile, announced its first candidate for a dwarf planet, an icy body with the provisional name 2026 ED138. Matthew Holman of the Center for Astrophysics found it on the evening of October 13th, 2026, running Rubin's data from March 4th to July 11th, 2026 through a search program he wrote with a colleague, Kevin Napier. The Minor Planet Center, which keeps the register, published the orbit the same day.

It is now about 46 astronomical units from the Sun, where one unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Pluto's average distance is 40. From its brightness and distance, the team puts it between 600 and 1,500 kilometres across, and an icy body that large is expected to be round, which is the test a dwarf planet has to pass. Its orbit is tilted almost 25 degrees from the flat plane the planets move in. You can turn the orbit in three dimensions.

Once found, old pictures of it turned up. The team found 20 more Rubin observations back to March 4th, and, through the Asteroid Institute's service for searching old sky images, pictures from the Dark Energy Camera going back to 2016, so more than ten years of its path are already known.

<figure> <img src="/news/2026-10-27-rubin-first-dwarf-planet-candidate-orbit.jpg" alt="The orbit of 2026 ED138 drawn in three dimensions against the orbits of the outer planets and the known dwarf planets, tilted well out of the plane the planets move in." width="733" height="300" loading="lazy"> <figcaption>The orbit of 2026 ED138 beside the planets and the five known dwarf planets. <a href="https://noirlab.edu/public/images/noirlab2626c/" rel="noopener">Picture</a>: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/R. Proctor; image processing M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab); orbit data from the IAU Minor Planet Center; star map NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Used under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" rel="noopener">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence</a>.</figcaption> </figure>

Why it is a candidate and not yet a dwarf planet

Brightness alone cannot fix a size, because a small bright body and a large dark one look the same from here. The release says plainly that observations in the infrared are needed to pin its size down and confirm what it is. If that confirms it, 2026 ED138 would join the five dwarf planets the International Astronomical Union recognises: Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake.

What it has to do with this site

The question the site asks is whether human industry reaches beyond Earth and Mars, and the outer solar system is the far end of that. But no step of the tree is about finding worlds, and this find changes no number. The nearest step is a hundred tonnes of material from an asteroid delivered to orbit in one year, and the honest link between that step and a world past Pluto is thin.

The nearer link is Rubin's wider work. In April, before its main ten-year survey began, the observatory's solar system team sent the Minor Planet Center more than 11,000 new asteroids from a month and a half of early data, among them about 380 icy bodies beyond Neptune. A telescope that maps the small bodies of the solar system at that pace makes the belt a known place rather than a guessed one, and knowing what is in the belt is a step toward using it. That is not a step on the tree. It is the map the steps will be walked on.

What to watch for

Two things. First, the infrared measurement of its size, which is what turns a candidate into a dwarf planet or not. Second, how many more of these the ten-year survey, which began in June 2026, turns up. When the size comes in, I will note it here. My odds will stay where they are. This post is the first of a new kind, a discovery, which says so up front.

Will I live and work in space before I die? Where the odds stand, and what could change them

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I'm 40 years old, and I want to leave the planet before I die, to live and work out there for months at a time. The name of this site comes from the Belters of the TV series The Expanse: the people who live and work in the asteroid belt, far from Earth, at home where nobody thought people could be. I want to see a solar system like that unfold, and to be part of it. Wanting it is easy. I would rather know my real odds than keep the wish vague.

So I built this site to work them out in public. It asks one question: what is the probability that, before I die, I live and work in a solar system where human industry reaches beyond Earth and Mars? Two things have to come true for that: industry has to get out there, and I have to be one of the people working in it.

To answer the question, I wrote down everything that would have to happen first, gave each step a plain test of what would count and a chance of it happening, and linked the steps by which ones depend on which. The math then works out the answer from all of them together, and the whole set of steps is drawn as one picture. A number built that way can be argued with one step at a time. Every January, the steps whose outcome became known during the year are checked against what actually happened, so the site finds out whether its guesses were any good.

This is the start of the site's news. When something moves my odds, or big news should have moved them and did not, I will write it up here. A quiet week gets no post. The longer story of why I started is in the essay that introduced the project. And if you have ever wondered whether you will see people living off Earth in your own lifetime, the same calculation runs for your birth year.

Where the Odds Stand

As of the last calculation, on October 11th, 2026, my odds are half a percent: a 0.5 percent chance that by 2071 I am living and working at a site off Earth, months at a time. 2071 is the year I reach my life expectancy, at about 85.

The two parts of the question come out very differently. The chance that human industry reaches beyond Earth and Mars at all, with or without me, is only 0.8 percent. The chance that I work months at a time at a space station or a base on the Moon, whether or not industry ever goes further, is much higher, at 9.3 percent.

A longer life would raise my odds, and a dial on the home page shows by how much: from half a percent to 1.2 percent if medicine adds about a decade, and to 14.8 percent if ageing is solved outright and the calendar stops mattering.

Why the Number Is So Small

Seven things all have to go right: getting to orbit has to get cheap, there has to be a power supply out there, ships have to be fast enough to make the trip routine, bodies have to hold up, people need a reason to go, governments must not wreck it, and there has to be a seat for me. Each is a maybe. The likeliest, the power supply, stands at 75 percent by 2071; the weakest, a reason for people to go, stands at 5.9 percent. Put seven maybes together and the chance of all of them coming true is small, even when no single one looks hopeless.

What the number gives me is a map. It shows which steps are likely to move in the next few years, so I know where to watch, and which ones would move my odds the most.

How the Number Moves

Every Sunday evening, Pacific time, an automated search checks the week's news against the test of each step that could be settled within about five years, and the first search of each month checks every step. What it finds is written down whether or not anything moved. It may change a chance by a small amount on the strength of a public source, or mark a step as done when two independent sources confirm it; anything bigger waits for me. Every weekly reading is kept on the site's Radar page, and the Method page explains how the numbers are worked out and who does what.

What Has Happened So Far

The site's first calculation, on September 19th, 2026, said zero: no chance at all by 2071. That was plainly wrong, and the fault was in the method. It treated every step as if it had nothing to do with the others, when in fact the steps lean on each other. Fixing that was one of four changes I made that day, and the second calculation came out at 0.9 percent.

The same day, I sent every step out for outside review, with the same instructions for each reviewer: name a missing step, challenge a test, argue a number up or down. I decided each of the 105 points they raised, and on September 20th, 2026, with those decisions in, my odds fell from 0.9 percent to 0.4 percent. Most of the fall came from seven new steps that now also have to go right.

The first big news from outside came on September 28th, 2026, when SpaceX's giant rocket Starship reached orbit for the first time. Neither part of the rocket was recovered, and recovery is what the launch steps test for, so nothing moved. That is the site working as it should: famous news that does not pass a step's test changes nothing.

Since September 20th my odds have stayed near half a percent, and in six weekly readings nothing has moved.

What to Watch

The nearest event is Starship's next flight, Flight 15, which is expected to make the first attempt to recover the rocket's upper part. SpaceX has announced no date, and the latest planning date I can find is no earlier than November 8th, 2026. The step it bears on counts only when both parts of one rocket come back intact from one flight to orbit and the company that flew it confirms they can fly again. Even then it would move my odds only a little, because the calculation already expects it to happen.

The steps that would matter most are slower and have no date. At the top of the list of steps that would move my odds most is a space traffic authority among the major powers, able to enforce rules on how spacecraft move and when rockets launch. No other step that could happen next would move my odds as far. After it come shielding that halves the radiation a crew takes in deep space, and a tonne of rocket fuel made from material found off Earth and burned in a rocket engine.

I am also following two plans with dates on them: Vast's Haven-1, a small commercial space station, now due no earlier than the first quarter of 2027, and NASA's Space Reactor-1 Freedom, a spacecraft powered by a nuclear reactor, proposed for December 2028. A plan is not an event, so neither moves my odds until it flies.

The next monthly search, the one that checks every step, is on November 1st, 2026, and the first yearly review, when every number is estimated afresh, is on January 3rd, 2027.

Corrected October 19th, 2026: the outside review began on September 19th, 2026, the same day as the first calculation; I first wrote here that it began the next day.

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