Welcome! “Alien Life” tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. You may notice that this and future entries are shorter than usual; Career, family and book deal commitments have forced me to cut back some of my projects. Now, here’s today’s news:
g Stars - Kent State faculty and graduate students are among a team of physicists who recreated the material essence of the universe as it would have been mere microseconds after the Big Bang—a quark-gluon plasma. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/
07/060712180328.htm.
g Abodes - Atomic oxygen could never be confused with expensive perfume. But just as a fragrance lingering in the air of an empty room offers hints about a previous occupant, the cloud of oxygen the Cassini spacecraft encountered as it first approached Saturn turned out to be a calling card from another celestial presence, the tiny moon Enceladus. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.phpop
=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2014mode=thread&order
=0&thold=0.
g Life - A new study helps answer a longstanding dinosaur mystery by revealing that the largest dinosaurs could likely maintain warm body temperatures while their smaller cousins were probably more similar to modern cold-blooded reptiles. See http://www.livescience.com/
animalworld/060710_dinosaur_temperature.html.
g Intelligence - Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher. And experience seems to play an important early role in how infants learn to understand and produce language. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060710164301.htm.
g Message - Is there life "out there"? If so, is it intelligent life? One way we can address the issue is to make a reasoned guess, based upon everything we know about astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a host of other disciplines. Many years ago the radio astronomer Frank Drake did just this, combining all the "knowledge" in the form of a mathematical equation now named for him: The Drake Equation. See http://www.physics.uc.edu/~sitko/Spring
00/10CHZs/chzs_planets.html.
g Cosmicus - NASA will test concepts for future space exploration next month by sending three astronauts and an oceanographer on a mission to an underwater laboratory off the coast of Florida. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.phpop=modload&name=
News&file=article&sid=2017mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.
g Learning - Some students "game" computer-based teaching programs (Intelligent Tutoring Systems, or ITS). New research at the USC Information Sciences Institute is looking at ways of predicting this behavior, and using such predictions to adapt the systems to fit individual student needs. Early results are promising. See http://
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060712233333.htm.
The Drake Equation
This formula estimates the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.N=(R*)(Ns)(Fp)(Ne)(Fl)(Fi)(Fc)(L)
Where:- N = Number of civilizations we can communicate with
- R* = Average star formation rate
- Ns = Percentage of stars capable of supporting earth-like planets
- Fp = Percentage of those stars with planets
- Ne = Average umber of planets in those stars' habitable zones
- Fl = Percentage of those planets where life begins
- Fi = Percentage of planets with life where an intelligent species evolves
- Fc = Percentage of those intelligent species that develop communication technology
- L = Average lifetime, in years, of a civilization that develops such technology
About Me
- Rob Bignell
- I'm the owner and chief editor at Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the editing and proofreading needs of writers both new and published. For more than two decades, I worked as an award-winning journalist, with half of those years spent as an editor. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres have been published, and I am the author of the nonfiction “Hikes with Tykes” series, a novel "Windmill", and a collection of poetry, "Love Letters to Sophie's Mom". For seven years I worked as an English teacher or a community college journalism instructor. I hold a master's degree in English and a bachelor's in journalism and English.