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 - NASA and Italian scientists using the Swift spacecraft have for the first time determined what the particle jets streaming from black holes are made of. The jets observed by Swift contain about the mass of Jupiter if it were pulverized and blasted out into intergalactic space. See http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0610/05blackholejets/.
g Abodes - Just as we near the end of the hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, winds whirl and clouds churn 2 billion miles away in the atmosphere of Uranus, forming a dark vortex large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States. See http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0610/02uranusspot/.
g Life - Twenty years have passed since the publication of “Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution,” co-authored by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan. In this interview with Astrobiology Magazine, Margulis explains one of the book’s central ideas: symbiogenesis. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/mod
ules.phpop=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2100mode
=thread&order=0&thold=0. For Part II of the interview, see: http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.phpop=modload&name=News
&file=article&sid=2104mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.
g Cosmicus - The continual advancement of technology will be critical in determining whether humanity will evolve into a true global civilization or destroy itself in the next century, a panel of experts said this week. See http://www.livescience.com/includes/iab.
htmlurl=/technology/060930_world_future.html.
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.