Believe it or not people used to argue that planetary formation can be super rare or even a set of conditions unique to our system. Not quite unlike the current narratives about extraterrestrial life.
I remember my teachers mocking me when I was saying that if the Sun is a star it's rather logical there are planets around other stars and that the view that they don't exist is the extreme one, but I was scoffed at that this is "pure speculation" and "science fiction".
On the other hand, when seeing a model of atom and solar system for the first time I was convinced reality is a set of layers with the micro- and macrocosm being just the two closest ones we're able to perceive, but I'm far less sure of it now.
> On the other hand, when seeing a model of atom and solar system for the first time I was convinced reality is a set of layers with the micro- and macrocosm being just the two closest ones we're able to perceive, but I'm far less sure of it now.
Yeah, I thought like this too until we started covering the basics of quantum physics and our teacher explained to us how the Bohr model of an atom was only a crude approximation of what's happening. I no longer see atoms as miniature solar systems, but every now and then, I ponder if the planets aren't macroscopic electron clouds...
I'd assume people had some some indirect evidence before. I remember some noise about exoplanets during my teenage years - there was a Polish astronomer[0] involved in the first discovery. But I thought to myself, surely everyone expected this to happen? I was later surprised to discover that even in the 90s, people seriously believed there were no extrasolar planets.
(Perhaps theirs was the more scientific position, and I was just a nerd biased by science fiction stories. But then, I was taught the Sun was just another star, and if God wanted our solar system to be special, surely He wouldn't need to create more planets than just the Earth? I guess I had some intuition for Occam's razor before I knew it by name...)
I only got a more complete picture of the timeline of discoveries much later in life, from this video[1].
(EDIT: it seems that the first discovery was in 1992, when I was single-digit years old, so the noise I remember about Wolszczan must have been about the other discovery in 2007.)
...but damn if it wasn't bloody obvious there must be some.