These are exciting times for planet hunters, with Kepler and CoRoT in the hunt, three ongoing searches for rocky worlds around Centauri A and B, and the continuing WISE mission, which may identify planet-bearing red and brown dwarfs that we haven't spotted yet, not to mention numerous radial-velocity, transit and microlensing projects. But stepping back to get the big picture is a bit sobering. Jean Schneider did that recently in a paper looking at the far future of direct imaging, wondering where we were headed after Kepler and CoRoT. Schneider (Paris Observatory) talks about a 'conceptual or knowledge horizon,' one we've discussed earlier, that limits us to detecting biomarkers and keeps us from going much further than that for centuries. Seeing Alien Life Up Close Why? A short article on Schneider's work in Astrobiology Magazine condenses the paper's argument. Suppose we do discover signs of life on a planet in the habitable zone of a nearby star. Huge space arrays could help...