Looking beyond our solar system, there is another reason to use quantum computers, and this is to catalogue all the planets circling other stars. Already, the Kepler space telescope and other satellites and ground-based telescopes have detected about 5,000 exoplanets in our own backyard of the Milky Way galaxy. This means that, on average, every star we see at night has a planet going around it. Perhaps roughly 20 percent of all exoplanets are earthlike, so that our own galaxy may have billions of earthlike planets beyond those we’ve already identified.
