Consider that space exploration is not yet even 100 years old nor is digital technology, which is advancing at a breath-taking pace.1 Assuming that such technology will continue unabated and that there are no negative impacts from other quarters,2 we can further assume that the ability of humans to probe the universe with increasingly powerful instruments will continue to increase and allow us to discover ever more about the planets around other stars.

The great advances in astronomy in the past century or so were initially theoretical in that they rested on predictions about what the universe is like and how certain phenomena such as light would behave on scales much larger than those on Earth.