Our Solar System Would Be Weird Even If It Didn’t Harbor Life
What would our solar system look like if an alien were to spot it from another planet, orbiting a distant star? How improbable would it appear? For the first time in human history, thanks to advances in exoplanet hunting, we can now answer that question. We can even put numbers on it. If that alien was 10 light-years away from us (in galactic terms, right next door) after a decade or two spent searching for planets orbiting our sun (with instruments similar to ours), this is what it would find:
Pretty sparse, isn’t it? No Earth or Mars. No rocky planets at all! No Saturn, no asteroid belt, no ice giants. All the aliens would
