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(Photo: Niels Bohr Institute)

Are you ready for millions upon millions of potentially habitable exoplanets, right here in our own Milky Way galaxy? That’s the latest finding from the Niels Bohr Institute:

Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, using the Kepler satellite and many of them have multiple planets orbiting the host star. By analysing these planetary systems, researchers from the Australian National University and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have calculated the probability for the number of stars in the Milky Way that might have planets in the habitable zone. The calculations show that billions of the stars in the Milky Way will have one to three planets in the habitable zone, where there is the potential for liquid water and where life could exist. The results are published in the scientific journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The space opera stuff is exciting, with all those massive alien fleets doing battle over scarce, habitable worlds. But I’d be happy to take a mostly empty galaxy just ripe for human colonization…