Moonage SpaceDream

Alpha Centauri has long been speculated as having all kinds of different life forms.  Wiki gives a good run-down.  Starting in 1944….  Well, here’s a brief list:

• In “Far Centaurus” (1944), the classic short story by A. E. van Vogt, an earth crew which travelled at sublight speed in hibernation to Alpha Centauri discover when they arrive that their mission was long forgotten and presumed lost, and that man has arrived long before them via superluminal travel and an unimaginably advanced human civilization has developed on the Centauri planets while they were sleeping.
• In Philip K. Dick’s early short story The Variable Man (1953), the inhabitants of the Alpha Centauri system possess a vast but decaying empire that encircles humankind and prevents further exploration of the galaxy. Dick also wrote the novel Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), which dealt with an independent former Terran Colony on Alphane III M2, an inhabitable satellite orbiting a gas giant within Alpha Centauri’s planetary system. Alphane II is inhabited by sentient  insectoids, who had previously fought an interstellar war with Earth, but are now engaged in an arms trade with Alphane III M2.
• Revolt on Alpha C (1955) was Robert Silverberg’s first novel.
• Gordon R. Dickson’s Childe Cycle (1959) has the planets Cassida and Newton in orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B, respectively.
• In Leigh Brackett’s Alpha Centauri - or die! (1963), the overly regulated government on Mars has become so stifling that a small group of men secretly restore an old spaceship and go with their families to a habitable planet of Alpha Centauri, where they can govern themselves.
• In Larry Niven’s Known Space(1964 onward), Wunderland is an inhabitable planet circling Alpha Centauri, and was the earliest extra-solar colony in human history.  Later it is occupied for a long time by the Kzinti, an intelligent catlike species, after their first contact with humans, which resulted in several interstellar wars.
• The Centauri Device (1975) by M. John Harrison the native Centaurians (humanoid aliens able to interbreed with humans) have been wiped out in a genocidal attack by expanding Earth colonisation of the galaxy. The novel’s main character, whose mother was Centauran, is one of the few people in the cosmos able to operate the ’device’ of the book’s title; a weapon of enormous power.
• In Stewart Cowley’s The Terran Trade Authority setting (1978–1980), Alpha Centauri is the home system of the Alphans, the first alien race Terrans made contact with and allies in the war with Proxima Centauri. In Thomas J. Hubschman’s novel Alpha II (1979) a failed colony at Alpha Centauri is the subject of an explorer’s investigations and troubles.
• In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s novel Footfall (1985), the invading   elephant-like creatures are revealed to have come from Alpha Centauri. In a discussion within the novel among science-fiction writers about the presumed origin of the so-called “snouts,” one writer dislikes the idea of Alpha Centauri because it is “trite,” but admits it got that way because it was used so often, and it was used so often because it was one of the best options.
• In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth (1986), Foundation councillor Golan  Trevize and his traveling companions find the last survivors of a radioactive Earth on a largely marine planet, Alpha, which is in orbit around the largest star of the Alpha Centauri system. The name of the settlement is New Earth.  
• In The Domination series (1988 onward) by S. M. Stirling, Samothrace is a planet in the Centauri system inhabited by descendants of those who managed to escape Earth after an oppressive militaristic nation known as The Domination of the Draka won control of the planet.
• Jack McDevitt’s short story “It’s a Long Way to Alpha Centauri” (1990).
• In Poul Anderson’s book, Harvest of Stars (1993), a fictitious planet of Alpha Centauri is colonized for the single millennium before the planet’s destruction by a rogue planet.
• In Flying to Valhalla (1993) and The Killing Star (1995) by Charles R. Pellegrino, Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri are home to multiple offshoots of an alien race called Alphans who become involved in an intricate plot revolving around the concept of a relativistic kill vehicle.
• In Alpha Centauri by William Barton with Michael Capobianco (1997), a terrorist plague endangers an exploration ship; the explorers discover the remains of an ancient civilization and a device that can see into the past to find out what happened to that race.
• Michael Ely has written a trilogy of novels based on Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999) computer game: Centauri Dawn (2000), Dragon Sun (2001), and Twilight of   the Mind (2002). The game also spawned a graphic novel, Alpha Centauri: Power of   the Mindworms (2000), written by Steve Darnell and Illustrated by Rafael Kayanan, and a GURPS role-playing rule book, GURPS: Alpha Centauri (2002).  
• In the Starfire series of novels (2002 onward) by David Weber and Steve White, Alpha Centauri is the most important system in the Terran Federation due to the large number of warp-point junctions in the system and its proximity (one warp transit) to Earth. It is the headquarters and principal shipyard of the Terran Federation Navy. Because of the nature of warp junction travel, it was believed to be secure from any attack because of the Terran Federation’s immense strategic depth, however in the novel In Death Ground, the Arachnids discovered a closed warp point into the Alpha Centauri system, allowing the system to be threatened and seriously attacked.
• In the motion picture Impostor (2002) the evil alien race opposing Earth was from Alpha Centauri. It is said that Centurians are superior in intelligence to humans.
• An inhabitant of Alpha Centauri appear twice in Doctor Who in the Third Doctor serials The Curse of Peladon (1972) and The Monster of Peladon (1974).  Alpha Centauri is depicted as a large egg shaped green blob wrapped in a cloak with a singular slit eye and a high pitched voice.
• In Flight of The Mayflower (2004), NASA, through the US Government and The Mayflower Consortium (a loosely-knit group of mega-corporations), send a manned mission to the second terrestrial planet of Alpha Centauri A, attempting to escape an Earth beset with civil unrest and nuclear war, and establish an outpost of Humanity, far from any threat posed to life on Earth. The flight takes ten years, propelled by two redundant 1 GW nuclear reactors fueling an ion drive.
• In “Metamorphosis,” (1967) an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the warp drive, is said to be from Alpha Centauri. He is also mentioned in the Star Trek novel Federation (1984) by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, the film Star Trek - First Contact (1996), and episodes of the TV series Enterprise (2001). conclusively establishes he is an Earth native, as he is found by the Enterprise-E crew on Earth in the late twenty-first century. It is established that Alpha Centauri is a colony founded by humans from Earth and that Cochrane lived on Alpha Centauri for a time before his mysterious disappearance. In Encounter With Tiber (1996), former astronaut Buzz Aldrin and science fiction writer John Barnes write about intelligent aliens who visited the Earth long ago.  They had come from the Earth-like moon Tiber of a hypothetical giant planet round Alpha Centauri A.

I know this list is incomplete, it doesn’t list Lost In Space.  That’s what got me thinking in the first place.  Anyways, fiction people have speculated about a lot of life on an Earth-like planet circling Alpha Centauri.  Probably more than any other star.   That’s quite a feat considering how many stars are out there.  So, wanna guess what the headline is in 2008, sixty-four years after Van Vogt told us?

Nearest Star System Might Harbor Earth Twin

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