From Earth, the Andromeda Galaxy glows faintly but perceptibly across 2.5 million light-years — a testament to the cumulative power of hundreds of billions of stars. Yet within that unified smear of ancient light, individual worlds remain utterly invisible to us, swallowed by the glare of their suns and separated from them by angles so vanishingly small that no instrument humanity has yet built can resolve them. It is a humbling asymmetry: we can perceive a galaxy in its entirety while remaining blind to the planets it almost certainly harbors. The search for Earth-like worlds beyond our own g