Personally I find this discovery rather sobering. It's becoming increasingly clear that solar systems are quite common. As our planet detection abilities incre

Personally I find this discovery rather sobering. It's becoming increasingly clear that solar systems are quite common. As our planet detection abilities increase to smaller and smaller planets I believe we'll find more and more of those too. Some of these (like this one) will be in the habitable zone of a star. Some of those assumedly will develop life. Some of those will develop sentient life. I just picture a timeline like Earth's projected on this planet, which of course has no basis in fact. But imagine a civilization that's had 2 billion years of life longer than ours? That's a really long time obviously. It's hard to imagine that such a civilization couldn't develop automated methods to populate the local space around them. This is one of the counterarguments to life being common in the universe of course. At 1% of the speed of light you could populate the galaxy with autonomous robots in a "mere" 10 million years. So our inability to detect anything like this gives weight to the argument that no such starfaring civilization exists or that they're less than ~10 milllion years old. Was there civilization on this planet and it died out for some reason? We'll probably never know. As these planets mount up (as I believe they will), it'll further strengthen the idea that we're basically doomed (ie the Great Filter) and further suggest we are a mere cosmic blink.