I think the proper term is circumstellar habitable zone. If there is other life out there, why are we assuming that it’ll have the same basic needs as our animals? The universe is seemingly infinite, and there’s endless possibilities of what’s out there, so why do we only consider planets that are the ‘perfect’ distance away from their star?
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Maybe one day we’ll be good at looking enough to look everywhere, and then we will!
For now, it’s *really really* hard to look, and we already know a lot about one kind of life: the kind we have here on Earth.
To hammer this home, just a couple years ago there was excitement around finding life markers on Venus. Venus. The planet right next door. We hadn’t been able to look at that one closely enough to rule out life.
In a nutshell, for every trillion planets out there we only have the time and skill to look at five of them, and the only way we know how to look is for familiar stuff anyways (e.g. radio signals). We’re shooting our best shot, but maybe in a thousand years we’ll be able to look much more carefully.
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