My personal future shock is bound up in the fact that we are now discovering planets outside of our solar system. Somehow, I just never expected that to happen in my lifetime.
The milestones keep getting knocked down: planets, multiple planets in the same system, super earths, now earth-size planets in the habitable zone. Wonderful stuff, and very exciting to think what we'll find next. It's not impossible to imagine that we'll develop the technology to conduct spectrographic analysis of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, maybe one day even discovering methane.
My assumption is that all solar systems orbit in more or less the same plane as their host galaxy. Is this why we're able to detect so many planets by this occultation technique? Presumably this is because the Milky Way and all it contains started out as one large accretion disk. Am I way off base?
