The subject material was fit for a college lecture hall, but the setting at the Vineyard Playhouse felt more like a cocktail party on Monday night, with small tables clustered around a microphone and a projector screen set up in the lobby of the playhouse. The biography of the featured speaker also indicated that the program was “not standard fare at the playhouse,” said board president Gerry Yukevich in his introduction.

Hans-Jürgen Melderis is a physician, author and a scholar of Richard Wagner. He hails from Hamburg, Germany, and on Monday he presented a program entitled Other Life in the Universe? On NASA’s Discovery of Extra Solar Earth-like Planets in the Goldilocks Zone.

Though the title seemed “out there,” as it were, the talk was in fact straightforward: how we have found planets that have the same conditions Earth did before life began here.

Dr. Melderis is a friend of playhouse board member Klaus Vogt, who invited him to speak. Armed with a laser pointer that beamed a star shape around the telltale red dot, and a slide show that at one point featured Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” suite, he kept the audience engaged for more than an hour, conjuring up old memories of astronomy courses.

“The first question I want to ask you is how many of you think that out there, way, way out there in the solar systems in the distant stars and planets, how many of you think that there is life in some form?” Dr. Melderis said.

Everybody raised their hands.

“And how many don’t?” Dr. Melderis continued.

No hands went up.

The audience was in good company, Dr. Melderis said. Throughout history, there have always been people predicting that there must be life somewhere else out there. He quoted Giordano Bruno, the Italian monk who proposed in 1584 that there were countless suns with their own planets orbiting them, but from Earth, we “see only the suns because they give light. The planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark.”

Dr. Melderis brought up a slide show featuring the German painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer), by Caspar David Freidrich. The painting, he said, could be a metaphor for man’s quest to find other life, with the fog standing in for distant nebula.

Dr. Melderis walked the audience through the formation of the universe some 13.77 billion years ago and the eventual formation of the solar system, which is a relative newcomer at 4.5 billion years old. A protosun formed through a thermonuclear reaction; small particles in its orbit built up mass over time, colliding with one another to grow larger and larger, until they were planet-sized.

“The formation of planets in our galaxy is not a rare process. It’s bound to happen,” Dr. Melderis said.

The makeup of the planets was determined by how far they were from the protosun. Life-supporting planets were located in the “Goldilocks zone,” or the habitable zone. In the habitable zone, it is neither too hot nor too cold, and conditions are suitable for an atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen to form. The atmosphere prevents water from instantly evaporating.

The Hubble telescope has been looking for protosuns for decades. It began to search for planets as well, but the technology at the time was only able to search for new planets nearly as big as Jupiter. It wasn’t until the Kepler telescope was built and launched in 2009 that NASA had a way of scanning for the small, rocky planets. Kepler does not orbit the Earth; it orbits the Sun, allowing scientists to focus on different sections of the Milky Way. In March of this year, Kepler 186f, a planet in the habitable zone orbiting a star called Kepler-186, was found. It is just 1.2 times the size of Earth.

There will need to be further leaps in technology in order to examine such a distant planet for other clues that might indicate life-forming conditions, Dr. Melderis said, but for now the man in the Freidrich painting was satisfied.

“Now he’s looking at the it, at the nebula, and he is quite sure there are habitable planets,” Dr. Melderis said.

In the question-and-answer session, Dr. Melderis underscored the fact that just because a planet could sustain life didn’t necessarily mean it would have intelligent life.

The formation of another planet that could sustain life could be explained, as could the transition from anorganic to organic material. But the probability of finding highly intelligent life, he felt, was miniscule.

In response to a question from the audience, Dr. Melderis also said that he did not see any sort of intelligent design in the galaxy formation.

“You can explain it just by chance and by the laws of physics and chemistry,” Dr. Melderis said.

One person asked whether it wasn’t somewhat egotistical to say that life could only exist as it is on our own planet.

“There could be entirely different forms of life,” Dr. Melderis acknowledged. “But since we know this life and this planet, in principle you’re right. But the carbon atom is such a wonderful atom, and carbon is very important in the whole universe.”