The bottom line is that the next several years of the COROT and Kepler missions will be hugely exciting, and then we will enter a frustrating period of dreaming of what might yet be found. That is not unusual: scientific understanding proceeds incrementally. Positive results may inspire the funding and completion of new spaceborne observatories. The search for planets in extreme settings such as the environs of neutron stars, white dwarfs and brown dwarfs will show us how robust planet formation is [see main article]. But we need to prepare ourselves for a long struggle to discover our planet’s rightful place in the cosmos.

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