Sunday, January 13, 2008

Messages we’ve sent to aliens and expected reactions at first contact

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 - A quartet of stars has been discovered in an intimate cosmic dance, swirling around each other within a region about the same as Jupiter's orbit around the sun. See article.
g Life - People with obsessive-compulsive hand-washing syndrome should stop reading right now. As well as all the microbes we do know about, some scientists suggest there could also be alien microbes living on Earth as well. This as yet undetected alien population of microbes could exist quite happily next to our own, and as such has been referred to as the “shadow biosphere”. See article.
g Message - Our attempts to contact intelligent life on other planets had led to some quite absurd messages and assumptions made, and some quite amazingly complicated messages sent out. See article.
g Learning - Where can high school science teachers learn more about the growing interdisciplinary field of Astrobiology? See article.
g Aftermath - It's to be expected that when/if our human civilization encounters extraterrestrial life, there'll be some pretty odd reactions from all sides. See article.

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