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 Life - Remains from a 95-million-year-old marine creature with nubs for legs is clarifying how some lizards shed their limbs as they crept through evolutionary time and morphed into slinky snakes. See http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/070326_lizard_limbs.html.
g Message - The next generation of big radio telescopes won't look anything like today's massive dishes. Instead of giant steel constructions towering into the sky, the future will belong to more economical arrays of many small antennas hugging the ground. And, in a historic role reversal, searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence are blazing a trail for conventional radio astronomy to follow. See http://skyandtelescope.com/printable/
resources/seti/article_256.asp.
g Cosmicus - Scientists in Europe are preparing for an ambitious program of exploration that includes the Moon and Mars. Europe's Aurora Programme endeavors to explore the solar system with numerous robotic missions, and to ultimately land humans on Mars in the 2030s. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.phpop=modload
&name=News&file=article&sid=2293mode=thread&order=
0&thold=0.
g Learning - Popularizing science has become a personal passion for astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium and a monthly essayist for “Natural History “ magazine, Tyson has also served on presidential commissions on the aerospace industry and the future of space exploration. His latest book, “Origins,” is a pocket history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the appearance of life on Earth. See http://www.americanscientist.org/template/
InterviewTypeDetail/assetid/39524;jsessionid
=baa9.
g Imagining - Book alert: A complaint that I see again and again of science fiction aliens — and I’ve made it myself — is that they look too much like us. Is that complaint valid? Is it so unlikely that extraterrestrials would look similar (not identical) to human beings? If so, then what would beings, intelligent or not so intelligent, who evolved on another world look like? That's what Cliff Pickover explores in "The Science of Aliens." See http://ufos.about.com
/gi/dynamic/offsite.htmsite=http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu
/pickover/soa.htm.
g Aftermath - If we find other civilizations, what will we say to them? Crafting a message that represents Earth and humanity and can be understood by another life form is no minor endeavor. SETI Institute psychologist Douglas Vakoch has been charged with this formidable task, and has enlisted the help of mathematicians, artists, astronomers and anthropologists. Hear the messages he helped compose and learn about the thinking behind them at http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/arecibo/tools/vakoch.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.