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 - In this lecture, Michael Brown talks about the discovery of Pluto in 1930, and explains how scientists today find other distant objects in the Kuiper Belt. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.phpop=modload
&name=News&file=article&sid=2253mode=thread&order
=0&thold=0.
g Life - NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life's molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.phpop=modload
&name=News&file=article&sid=2255mode=thread&order
=0&thold=0.
g Intelligence - People see what they believe, not vice versa, when it comes to social injustice. See http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/070228_moral_outrage.html.
g Learning - School can be a real yawn. Two out of three high-school students in a large survey say they are bored in class every single day. See http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/070228_bored_students.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.