Planets have been found in the strangest of environs, including post-supernova pulsars, and multiple star systems, where conventional wisdom almost ruled out their presence. Perhaps most exciting, however, is the presence of planets around ordinary main-sequence stars like our sun, where life could form and evolve.
With the recent hints of life on Mars and Europa within our own solar system, and even the discovery of life in the boiling heat miles deep into the crust of the Earth, we may, for the first time, begin to think of life in the galaxy as common, rather than rare. If this turns out to be the case, we shall receive still another slap to our geocentric egos. But nearly inestimable is the amount we could learn about life and about ourselves from these unimaginably strange and differently adapted organisms which have formed and evolved in the harsh extremes they call home.
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