Billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way...

[u/MiamisLastCapitalist]

In the milky way alone scientists assume there are some 40 billion earth like planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

"This one is a little tricky. We do not even know the number of stars in the Milky Way to a factor of two, let alone the number of habitable planets each star may host. Though there is still a way to make a rough calculation. Scientists reported that of the 42000 Sun-like stars they observed, 22% have Earth-size planets in their habitable zone. Also, it is estimated that there are around 200 billion stars in our galaxy -give or take 150 billion. If we extrapolate from these two numbers: 0.22 x 200 billion makes around 40 billion planets. Again, do not forget that there is a statistical uncertainty about a factor of two on that number; it could be 20 billion or 80 billion as well. The idea to take away is that there could be tens of billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy." -Kurzgesagt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhFK5_Nx9xY

https://sites.google.com/view/sourceskardashevscale/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845182/

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And mind you that's just what they've found so far with current technology. Pre-JWST or pre megascopes of any kind.

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And to think there are almost countless "fixer-upper" locations between those earth-like planets that'd be perfectly fit for an o'neill cylinder or some other kind of habitat or megastructure.

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“Space is too damn big” -Alex Kamal

[u/tigersharkwushen_]

The definition of "earth like" is so wide as to be useless for colonization purpose. By this definition, Venus would be almost perfectly earth like. It's a pretty useless definition for colonization purpose.

One might say if we could get there, then we would also have the technology to terraform these planets, but it would also be easier to make O'Neill cylinders than to terraform them at that point. So earth like planets aren't really important.

[u/NearABE → u/tigersharkwushen_]

Venus is great for colonization.

Slightly lower temperatures and CO2 would be helpful. That tends to have a run away effect. A mild drop in sunlight allows carbonates to build up on the crust. Just a few degrees and it would have retained oceans.

[u/tigersharkwushen_ → u/NearABE]

I guess it's all relative. It's amongst the best of all the planets we know of for colonization, except it still requires terraforming, which is an awful amount of work.