This is my idea of a jackpot for E.T. research. I've gone over a few star catologs, and I got a great idea from one of them. Imagine a star system with five or more stable K or G class stars linked together in stable, predictable orbit around each other. Do you see where am getting at :P ? Imagine how planets might form around them. I'd say at least 50 all together, half rocky and half gas giants, and maybe two or three planets with masses 5 to 10 that of Jupiter like the ones in most extrasolar systems. Now, that might mean that the system might have 5 Earth-like planets and who knows how many Earth-like moons. How many cicvilizations might develope in that system? Great idea right !

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<span style='color:green'>&quot;We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be add to our own. Resistance is futile.&quot;
Borg Hail</span>

On one hand, it's worth looking at such multi-star systems as they would be interesting because of the interesting effects they would have on each other.

One the other hand, I suspect that the continuously changing gravitational environment would not necessarily encourage planet formation. Maybe tidal forces would keep the fragments from forming anything larger than an asteroid. And even if the stars' orbits are stable, the conditions on any planets in the vicinity would not be as stable as if there were just one sun. You might find that the potential for life arose frequently but the conditions changed too quickly for it to become established and flourish.

If you're looking for life, I'd prefer five completely separate stars to one five-fold linked cluster.

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Spike
:)

Ok, ok I was wrong. But still how many alien cicvilizations could we find in one system?

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<span style='color:green'>&quot;We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be add to our own. Resistance is futile.&quot;
Borg Hail</span>

It was a cool idea though. Maybe you should write sci-fi novels.

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Climate Change Australia

I agree that it was a cool idea. B)

A multi-star system would be a brilliant place to observe from. I can't imagine what it would really be like there. Maybe there'd always be at least one sun in the sky so you'd have eternal daytime. The planets would probably be unstable because of all the changing tidal forces. Could be that there would be just an entire solar system of asteroids.

Or maybe it was just created artificially so that someone could play "planet pool". Use a planet as the cue ball and try to pot it into a nearby black hole. Echoes of Red Dwarf, I think.

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Spike
:)

Well, regardless of the system, there's a lot of room out there. We could have hundreds of Earths orbiting the Sun, at our distance, without interfering with each other. And we easily have to mass for hundreds of Earths contained in Jupiter.

This is similar to the Ringworld idea, but not as extreme

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Live long enough to see Space!

We can get to space as a species. The above link is information about life-extension (living longer) so that you can personally see a space-based civilization.

The MPrize (a prize to encourage life extension research now contains over 3 million dollars.

Multi star system? Cool B)

Here is a senerio I worked out based on a K type main sequence star, a planet in the life zone, and a red dwarf in the fringes of the system. Just far enough to provide a good light source, but just far enough where it's gravity will not cause any major effects.

Five or more K or G class stars might be a little to much. But some researches think that the Alpha Centauri system might somehow have dozens of planets and many more moons, how? But I still need a estimate. How many civilizations could develope in one system :huh: ? And thanks kashi, maybe I should write a novel.

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<span style='color:green'>&quot;We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be add to our own. Resistance is futile.&quot;
Borg Hail</span>

I'd say that only one species can develop in a system. The speed of evolution is so variable, that races won't civilise at the same time. This means that the fastest race will dominate the whole system before other races can evolve to the point where they're 'intelligent'.

For example, suppose Mars was capable of supporting life, and they received spores from Earth during the dinosaur period. Those spores would start to evolve, but chances are, humans evolved millions of years faster. This means, we're going to Mars this century and colonising it first.

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Live long enough to see Space!

We can get to space as a species. The above link is information about life-extension (living longer) so that you can personally see a space-based civilization.

The MPrize (a prize to encourage life extension research now contains over 3 million dollars.

It is quite likely that one or more species on each viable planet would develop sentience: however as they became aware of each other and swapped ideas and technology, their separate civilizations would merge into one of common culture. After one of them developed genetic engineering, the various species might even merge. Just imagine the ideological wrangles they could get into over whether and when to take some unifying step forward.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

I'm not just talking about one planet. Also Earth-Like moons. Now how many?

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<span style='color:green'>&quot;We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be add to our own. Resistance is futile.&quot;
Borg Hail</span>

That's an interesting point: Some of the moons of the gas giants are extremely large things: some almost as big as Mars and covered in ice. If jupiter were where the earth is now, Callisto and Ganymede may have liquid oceans. I'm not sure how "earthlike" such planets would be considering lower gravity (1/6-1/12) and lower atmospheric pressure (and very weird seasons as they do their months long transits about the parent planet), but I could imagine life forming.

We can see gas giants in other star systems, some of them in very close orbits around their parent star. Some are in the habitable zone. Frustrating thing though is we still can't see their moons or terrestrial planets (too small/dim)

But one of the good points is that evolution is sloooooooow. Civilization is blazing fast by comparison. We went from dwelling in caves to launching things to the moon faster than the neanderthals were beaten by cro-magnum men. If intelligent life evolves, then it will probably develop technology and dominate the system before the next intelligent lifeform evolves.

On the other hand, an interesting question is how many intelligent life-forms will civilization develop? I've always wondered what we might do once we have our mitts firmly on our genetic code.

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