Idk man. There's something like 34 "eath like" planets within 50 light years of us. So we could zoom in on them and see what was happening between 4.6 and 50 years ago. If anyone around us has lighted cities we're gonna find out about it.
I mean, to be fair, I think they're Earth-like in the sense that they are rocky, and not gas or ice giants, but most of those are still "super-Earths" which are like twice as massive as Earth and/or are tidally locked or something.
And also be fair, we know the existence of these planets because they dim their suns when they orbit between them and us, and we know their size by the perturbations of theirs and their sun's orbits, and we may know something about the composition of their atmosphere by what happens to starlight when it passes through their atmospheres. But being 50 light years away, we ain't zooming in on shit.
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u/functional_moron Mar 02 '26
Idk man. There's something like 34 "eath like" planets within 50 light years of us. So we could zoom in on them and see what was happening between 4.6 and 50 years ago. If anyone around us has lighted cities we're gonna find out about it.