Is There A Better Planet Out There For Us? - Where Life Can Form in the Milky Way

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On Valentine’s Day 1990, as the Voyager 1 space probe pushed towards the outer edge of our solar system, its cameras looked back to where it had come from to snap a series of photographs. Taken at a distance of about four billion miles from Earth, the images form the first and only “family portrait” of six of the eight planets arrayed around their parent star. In one, the Earth appears as a pinprick of light just one 12th of a pixel in size, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”, as the astronomer Carl Sagan observed.

This image is still the furthest-away photograph ever taken of our “blue dot”, underscoring its beauty and fragility, imploring us to take care of the only place we know that harbours life: our home. It is infinitely precious — and yet, in the three decades since Voyager’s backward glance, we have learnt that our neighbourhood scatter of worlds is far from unique.