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 Abodes - A conference on Mars Polar Science recently met in Davos, Switzerland. By studying the poles, scientists are learning about the history of water on the planet, and how that has affected Mars' potential for life. See article.
g Life - Genetic analysis of a worm-like creature retrieved from the depths of the North Atlantic sheds light on the ancestor of chordates, backboned animals that include human beings. This study confirms that the common ancestor of chordates didn't have a brain, but rather a diffuse neural system in the animals surface. This finding, which implies that the brain might have evolved independently more than twice in different animal lineages, has implications for our understanding of how intelligence evolves. See http://www.astro
bio.net/news/modules.phpop=modload&name=News&file=article&sid
=2134mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.
g Cosmicus - What do you think blast-off does to your blood pressure? When Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space 37 years ago, Project Mercury scientists had to invent an automatic measuring device to find out. Today, you can find the device in just about any drugstore for an instant check-up. It is just one of an ever-growing number of medical spin-offs from space. See http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9811/02/space.medical/index.html. Note: This article is from 1998.
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.