m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

James Patrick Kelly’s September Asimov’s column was about SETI. The link to StarGen caught my eye, but I just got around to following it today.

StarGen is [...] a program for creating moderately believable planetary systems around stars other than our own. The most recent version runs on Macintosh and Unix machines and produces HTML files as output.

Here’s the sample page of generated solar systems. Click on a solar system to see the sorts of vital stats StarGen can cook up for you.