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 infrared surveyor AKARI, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency mission with ESA participation, is nearing the completion of its first scan of the entire sky. During this phase of the mission, it has supplied the largest wavelength coverage of the Large Magellanic Cloud to date, and provided fascinating new images of this galaxy. See article.
g Abodes - Conventional wisdom suggests that the Earth's moon has seen no widespread volcanic activity for at least the last 3 billion years. Now, a fresh look at existing data points to much more recent release of lunar gasses. See http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0611/10moon/.
g Intelligence - Of all primates, human eyes are the most conspicuous; our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen. Our colored irises float against backdrops of white and encircle black pupils. This color contrast is not found in the eyes of most apes. According to one idea, called the cooperative eye hypothesis, the distinctive features that help highlight our eyes evolved partly to help us follow each others' gazes when communicating or when cooperating with one another on tasks requiring close contact. See http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/061107_human_eyes.html.
g Message - Forget waiting for ET to call — the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia. See http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breakwww.ing_news/breaking_news__international_news&
articleid=134442. Note: This article is from 2004.
g Cosmicus - The Indian Space Research Agency has proposed starting a human spaceflight program, with the first manned flight taking place by 2014 leading up to landing an Indian national on the Moon by 2020, ahead of China. See http://www.space.com/includes
/iab.htmlurl=/news/061110_india_mannedspace.html.
g Learning - In a lifetime devoted to instrumentation and rocket science, James Van Allen made immense contributions to the exploration of the space environment and its astrobiological potential. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.phpop
=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2143mode=thread&
order=0&thold=0.
g Imagining - Could the legendary dragons of Pern from Anne McCaffrey’s famous science fiction novels actually exist? Welcome to the theoretical science of dracogenetics. See http://www.geocities.com/jenaith/DNA1.html.
g Aftermath - Scientists such as the SETI Institute’s John Billingham and Jill Tarter have taken the lead in planning for the day we might receive a signal from life beyond Earth. Working with diplomats and space lawyers, they have helped develop protocols that guide the activities of SETI scientists who think they may have detected extraterrestrial intelligence. See http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_protocols_010228.html. Note: This story is a couple of years old.
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.