I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I play one on TV. So I’m sometimes caught flat-footed by things such as the fact that Beta Hydri isn’t a main sequence star.
You may ask, “Why is that important?”
If I understand things correctly — and I might not — it’s because Earth-like planets can only form in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ (the distance that’s “just right” for liquid water to exist) around a main sequence star. The proper conditions for life as we know it just don’t exist anywhere else.
So if you’ve read The Marann, you know the Tolari were planted in the Beta Hydri system, but you may have also noticed that the planet is covered with vegetation and occupied by six-limbed creatures. So if life couldn’t have evolved there, how did that happen?
Fortunately, I have an out. *Christie waves her hands* While the Tolari were planted on Tolar by a highly advanced race of wizard geneticists (which I might tell you more about some day), it turns out Tolar was an ongoing experiment of these same aliens, who terraformed (tolariformed?) the planet at least in part to save another species from Beta Hydri’s expansion (it’s already 1.8 times larger than our sun — a planet at Earth’s orbital distance would bake). It was a convenient place to put the human test subjects. Yay! Problem solved!
I hope. *grin*
I love those moments when something suddenly clicks into place and seems obvious, as if it could not have been any other way. So of course, if a civilization is advanced enough to seed a planet it will know about terraforming. And why wouldn't it seed two different species on the same planet? Is it all that different to having a dog and a cat and a budgie etc all in the same house? Of course not! 🙂