David Kipping

That was Kepler's primary mission, and it

really just kind of flirted with the answer, didn't quite get to a definitive answer.

But I always say, look, if that's our primary goal, to look for Earth-like, I would say, worlds, then moons has to be a part of that.

Because we know that Earth-like, from the Kepler data, the preliminary result is that Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars is not an inevitable outcome.

It seems to be something like a 1% to 10% outcome.

So it's not particularly inevitable that that happens.

But we do often see about half of all Sun-like stars have either a mini-Neptune, a Neptune, or a Jupiter in the habitable zone of their stars.

That's a very, very common occurrence that we see.

Yet we have no idea how often they have moons around them, which could also be habitable.

And so there may very well be, if even one in five of them has an Earth-like Moon or even a Mars-like Moon around them, then there would be more habitable real estate in terms of exomoons than exoplanets in the universe.

Absolutely.

And just know where to look.

I mean, we would like to know where should we listen for technosignatures?

Where should we be looking for biosignatures?

And not only that, but what role does the Moon have in terms of its influence on the planet?

We talked about these directly imaged telescopes earlier, these missions that want to take a photo to quote Carl Sagan, the pale blue dot of our planet, but the pale blue dot of an exoplanet.

And that's the dream, to one day capture that.

But as impressive as the resolution is that we are planning and conspiring to design for the future generation telescopes to achieve that, even those telescopes will not have the capability of resolving the Earth and the Moon within that.

It'll be a pale blue dot pixel

but the moon's grayness will be intermixed with that pixel.