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RE: The best places to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system, ranked - MIT Technology Review
There are 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and currently we're capable of detecting life around a single digit number of them at best. Even the planets we've found are all within a few thousand light years of earth, and represent a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the planets in the galaxy, we don't need to be looking at anything outside our galaxy. And even if we do, there's still plenty of galaxies close to the Milky Way.
All good points, but this article was specifically about prospects for finding life in our solar system. If we find life elsewhere in our solar system, that should tell us something about the likelihood of finding life in the rest of the Milky Way.