James Jenkins, an astronomer from the Universidad de Chile and Visiting Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, noted in a recent paper:
Tau Ceti is one of our nearest cosmic neighbours and so bright that we may be able to study the atmospheres of these planets in the not too distant future. Planetary systems found around nearby stars close to our Sun indicate that these systems are common in our Milky Way galaxy.
In the same paper, Steve Vogt from the University of California Santa Cruz stated:
This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets. They are everywhere, even right next door! We are now beginning to understand that Nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer systems that have a multiple planets with orbits of less than one hundred days. This is quite unlike our own solar system where there is nothing with an orbit inside that of Mercury. So our solar system is, in some sense, a bit of a freak and not the most typical kind of system that Nature cooks up.
And we thought we might be the model for other planetary systems. I guess our ideas needed to start somewhere.
As far as locating a promising planet around Tau Ceti, this would not be all that surprising to science fiction writers such as Asimov, Heinlein, and Niven. For example, in Larry Niven's 1968 story A Gift from Earth, he discusses the planet of Plateau circling Tau Ceti, as noted in this Wikipedia summary:
Plateau, a colony in the Tau Ceti system, was settled by humans some 300 years before the plot begins. The colony world itself is a Venusian type planet with a dense, hot, poisonous atmosphere. It would be otherwise uninhabitable, except for a tall monolithic mesa that rises 40 miles up into a breathable layer in the upper atmosphere. This gives the planet a habitable area about half the size of California.
Man's imagination can be quite a source of inspiration for later science.
Note: Not to say it is always inspirational. Here is the description of Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream:
In this satirical alternate history, Adolph Hitler emigrates as a youth to the United States, where he becomes first a pulp science fiction illustrator, then a hack genre author of distinctly limited talents. In a story-within-a-story he pens a potboiler novel entitled Lord of the Swastika, which culminates in legions of seven-foot, blond, superintelligent male SS clones being shipped off to Tau Ceti where they will establish a colony as the first step to a literal thousand-year reich and galactic domination.
