We don't know enough to know whether any planet could survive inside a globular cluster, by which I mean it could maintain a stable orbit inside the life zone over the course of billions of years without being perturbed out of it by encounters with neighboring stars.

But if it could, imagine what the night sky would be like inside something like M5?

And a different thing: within a tenth of a light year there would be a multitude of stars. The star density makes our neighborhood look impoverished, and if stars were that close together, then interstellar flight would no longer be quite so daunting.

M5 dates back something like 13 billion years, and if intelligent life developed in it, I find myself imagining that the whole cluster might be one big interstellar civilization.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 11:18 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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