this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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Beyond what's been said already, we 100% do not have any way to take a picture of a planet outside our solar system that shows any detail of the planet's surface, and no plans to make a telescope that can do that. What we do right now to even tell if there are planets around other starts is look at the star's light and see if it gets slightly darker on regular intervals, indicating that a planet is crossing between us and the star in a regular orbit. Right now we can barely take a decent picture of Pluto, which is in our solar system. And checking the light brightness is really only good for looking for large planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn.
It's like seeing a car at night on a mountainside 4 miles away with its headlights on. It's just sitting there and you are wondering if it's a car or something else. It's hard to even tell it's 2 lights, it just looks like one light from that distance. But what would we see if someone walked in front of the car with the headlights on? The light get dim on one side and bright again, then dim and bright again on the other side. Sort of the same thing.
As for the uncanny valley part, it's because whoever came up with the graphic just did a random splash of water and land. The planet could be orange and magenta-colored, we have no idea. They used colors familiar to us looking at images of Earth because the intent is to make you think "it's like Earth, but different."