A Census of Worlds We Cannot Reach

In Apotheora’s alternate September 2026, two hundred million people watched NASA’s Roman Space Telescope leave Earth. It carries a mandate no telescope has held: not to study planets one by one, but to count them — a census of worlds across the galaxy.

Pola Rees speaks with Dr. Yuki Nakanishi, an astrophysicist at a Japanese space research institute whose models turn microlensing data from the upcoming NASA space telescope into a planetary population map, and who watched the launch at four a.m. from the campus where she wrote them.