“The Kepler Mission was just the first step in humankind’s discovery of planetary systems in the Milky Way. It only observed 1/400th of the sky. It could only detect planets out to 3,000 light years, which is tiny compared to the Milky Way’s size of 100,000 light years. Using Kepler’s detections, astronomers have estimated that there could be as many as 40 billion planets in our galaxy. But that is only one galaxy! Imagine how many planets are littered among the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Perhaps planets from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?”