Gimme Culture

The bottom line is, I think, very clear; there really are planets everywhere, and they must number in the hundreds of billions in the Milky Way.

Thus, the sheer abundance of planets profoundly impacts the nature of our exploration of the universe and our quest to understand our own significance or insignificance. There is nothing trivial about the discovery of planetary plentitude, because it means that we are finally on the cusp of seeing whether a statement made two and a half thousand years ago is correct or not:Despite where we find ourselves, on a small rocky world, there was no reason to believe that the universe would make planets as efficiently as it seems to. Our situation is merely one data point, and a horribly biased a posteori one at that, and our models of planet formation are, to be quite frank, struggling to keep up with the flood of new data. Nonetheless, from the point of view of astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere, planetary bodies remain the primary, critical, target. There are simply no other environments in the cosmos that offer the same potential for diverse and complex chemistry in multiple phases of matter, and the potential for such long-term equilibrium (albeit a dynamic type of equilibrium with energy and chemistry in both sporadic and cyclical flux).

“To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow”

- Metrodorus of Chios (Fourth Century B.C.)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2012/01/20/an-abundance-of-exoplanets-changes-our-universe/