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 - If you want to find extraterrestrial intelligence, you're going to have to look in the right place. In our galaxy alone there are more than 100 billion stars, so you might expect to find a profusion of alien abodes. But which suns do you point your telescope at? Bright, yellow stars like our own Sun have always seemed the obvious place to start. In the past few years, though, researchers have begun to wonder if they've been neglecting a whole class of likely targets: red dwarfs. See article. Note: This article is from 1999.
g Abodes - Anyone connected to the Internet can now see Mars through the eyes of the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet. The collection includes important scientific images of craters, caverns and sedimentary rocks used by researchers to yield clues about the history of Mars' environment. See article.
g Life - Quote of the Day: "Nothing in Biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution." — T.H. Dobzhansky
g Cosmicus - Until space tourism becomes a substantial business space activities, including particularly all crewed space activities, will remain a burden on taxpayers. But some argue that no activity other than tourism offers similar promise of turning space activities into profitable commercial activities in the foreseeable future. See http://www.spacefuture.com/tourism/taxes.shtml.
g Learning - In the 19h century, the new science of geology was greatly affected by technological innovations. From Astrobiology Magazine, European Edition is an essay about how Jules Verne used his novels, such as “Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” to explore the latest geological findings. See http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2356&mode=thread&
order=0&thold=0.
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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.