Likely something facilitating direct imaging, which would require canceling out almost all of the light from the parent star (diminishing it by a factor of at l

Likely something facilitating direct imaging, which would require canceling out almost all of the light from the parent star (diminishing it by a factor of at least 10^6:1). While there are some techniques that could facilitate that (such as enormous star shades coupled with space telescopes) they wouldn't enable the sort of shotgun survey approach that Kepler has been able to do, but it would enable us to survey and extensively study stars one at a time for planets.