For most of human history, we assumed the cosmos held planets like our own — or perhaps none at all. In thirty years, astronomers have confirmed over six thousand worlds orbiting distant stars, and the deepest revelation is not the abundance but the strangeness: the galaxy's most common planets are a kind we have never seen, existing nowhere in our own solar system. This absence has quietly overturned our assumptions about how planets form and what a typical world looks like, leaving us as students of a universe that did not consult our neighborhood before setting its norms.