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 - The heart of one of the Milky Way galaxy's most massive star clusters harbors as many as five pinwheels, a strange and relatively newly discovered type of stellar object, astronomers say. See article.
g Abodes - Data from the Galileo space probe suggest that liquid water may lie beneath Ganymede's icy crust. See http://www.astrobio.
net/news/modules.phpop=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=93. Note: This article is from 2000.
g Life - Insect bite marks in ancient leaf fossils are shedding new light on how nature bounced back after an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs and much of life on Earth 65 million years ago. See http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060831_KT_biodiversity.
html.
g Intelligence - A tiny island in the middle of nowhere is like a world in miniature, a new study finds. Rapa island lies isolated in the South Pacific, halfway between South America and New Zealand. Initially cooperative, its first settlers turned to violence when faced with the same pressures of environment and competition happening right now across the globe, the research suggests. See
g Cosmicus - NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft has snapped its first high-resolution photo, an image of distant stars that shows the probe's high-resolution camera works. See http://
www.space.com/missionlaunches/060901_new_horizons.html. For related story, see “Pluto: Down But Maybe Not Out” at http://www.
space.com/scienceastronomy/060831_planet_definition.html.
g Learning - Here’s a neat teacher info source, courtesy of PBS: “Life on other Worlds: Our Solar System and Beyond.” See http://
www.pbs.org/teachersource/scienceline/archives/april00/feature.
shtm.
g Imagining - Like first contact stories? Then be sure to read Timothy Zahn’s novel “Conqueror's Pride,” published by Bantam Spectra in 1994.
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.