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 - The possibility that life may once have evolved on Mars is strongly linked to the availability of liquid water over long time periods. So what criteria would make a good site for an astrobiological expedition on that world? See http://cmex.arc.nasa.gov/SiteCat/sitecat2/selexo.htm.
g Cosmicus -NASA is spending billions of dollars to search for life on Mars, the most Earth-like of our sister planets. But we may not need to go all the way to Mars to find another sample of life, says one astrobiologist. It could be lurking under our very noses. See http://www.justpacific.com/bits.
g Message -Quote of the Day: “Wow!” — Note scribbled on edge of printout indicating the Big Ear Telescope had picked up an extraterrestrial message
g Cosmicus -From the economic point of view, building orbital accommodation has the great attraction that it will provide a large-scale commercial outlet for the know-how developed with the US space station Skylab that operated from 1973-74, the two Russian stations Salyut and Mir, and the International Space Station being developed in the late 1990s. Many tens of billions have been and are being spent on these - but only one of each is ever built! So none of the manufacturers can make any money, and taxpayers have to pay for it all - but they never get to go! A truly crazy "lose-lose" situation! See http://www.spacefuture.com/habitat/businesscase.shtml.
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.