Mark — Are you sure you’re not thinking of the constellation Sphincter? Cygnus, in Chinese lore, is the site of the once-a-year magpie bridge, so I assume it has 1.2 billion admirers even though we look at it askance.

And besides, the whole project comes down to looking for shadows billions of miles away in the dark. Not only will it be hard to see something, it will be as hard to prove they didn’t see something.

Remind’s me of Winston Churchill’s fearless promise to provide an estimate of the cost of WWI to the Empire. When his staff gasped and said an accurate estimate could not be assembled for 17 years, he said “Right … we can’t be wrong for 17 years.”

By the same reasoning, if Earth were tilted to the orbital plane by 90 degrees, the sun would rise over the north pole and set over the south pole, and we wouldn’t even know it was there. But we’d all be frantic that the equator might melt because of global warming.

Actually, the plan is for Kepler to maintain a fixed gaze on an entire sector of stars — hundreds of thousands? — so that the percentages would dictate finding enough of them with orbital planes properly oriented. But don’t believe the ignorant bastard who wrote this post.