Life Among the Stars!

It is now widely believed by astronomers that life -- intelligent life -- life capable of extra-planetary communication, say -- is likely somewhere in the Universe. The reason is that the Universe is so extraordinarily vast that even if the circumstances leading to such "intelligent" life are extraordinarily rare (and they may not be) there is still is ample opportunity for such life to arise. (Here's a fun and interactive Drake equation so you can do your own calculations.)


The Earth and the solar system we're in, however, are towards the outer edges of our galaxy.  Communication, based the repeatedly proven special theory of relativity and on our best knowledge, is limited by the speed of light. We are so far from other stars, and so very far from any real prospects of other "intelligent" life, that the chances we will every communicate with life beyond our solar system are de minimis. Even if life is relatively "common" we'll likely never share in stellar communications. (The distance also makes it unlikely that we'll colonize planets beyond our solar system.)

But what about life that arises closer to the center of a galaxy -- that arises, in other words, closer to other star systems -- that arises close enough to other life such that each message would not take eons to transmit, but a few hours, a few days, or few weeks?  It is, I think (for what little it's worth), likely that such systems exist somewhere out there. (For obvious reasons, communication would very likely precede physical contact for interchanges different lifeforms; in addition, an "alien" society on such a planet is more likely to be able to colonize other planets than we are.)

Yesterday news came that planets have now been located within the Beehive star cluster -- a tight collection of stars. The article refers to the planets as Jupiter sized (of course, the larger planets are always discovered first).  The stars involved are "sunlike" -- i.e. G-type main sequence stars.  As a summary article at National Geographic states:

Their observations uncovered telltale wobbles and in two sunlike stars—so-called Doppler shifts. Such variances occur when an orbiting planet's gravity gently tugs a star toward or away from us, causing the star's light to shift slightly between shorter and longer wavelengths. 

Sun-like stars are similar in age and mass to our own sun and release energy steadily over billions of years—just-right conditions for the formation of potentially habitable planets.

National Geographic ledes with the idea that planets in the Beehive would have extraordinary nights given the number and brightness of the stars that would be in the sky.  Well, that's a beautiful idea.  It's also true that were intelligent life to exist here -- the kind of life that could appreciate the beauty of the night sky (not likely given the low probabilities but there are hundreds of billions of similar situations likely in the Universe and in some it likely does exist) -- it would be much more able to colonize other planets and communicate with other planets.  So ... Yeah!