Thursday, December 11, 2008

Overlords of the Earth and analyzing a signal from space

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 Northern Chile, a pick-up truck bumps along dusty old mining roads toward the Atacama Desert. A team of scientists is driving from the coastal town of Antofagasta, and they occasionally pass other vehicles on the road -mostly prospectors searching for metals and minerals. After an hour, they arrive at a lonely meteorological station situated in the driest part of a very dry desert. See article. Note: This article is from 2002.
g Life - We humans think we're pretty tough, pretty smart, and pretty much the Overlords of the Earth. Well, we are sorta smart, and we've used those smarts to make us much tougher than we are naturally. In some sense, we have, indeed, become the Overlords of the Earth. Technological wonders notwithstanding, the range of conditions that we can endure is still very limited. Of course, we view the rest of the cosmos from our own perspective. As such, we define places that we find personally uncomfortable as "extreme environments", but does this term have any real meaning for biology on Earth and for exobiology on other planets? See article. Note: This article is from 1999.
g Message -The search for extraterrestrial intelligence could be taking the wrong approach. Instead of listening for alien radio broadcasts, a better strategy may be to look for giant structures placed in orbit around nearby stars by alien civilizations. See article.
g Learning -Here’s a neat interactive Web game where you analyze a signal from space, just as would a SETI astronomer.

Honoring the Past, Inspiring the Future


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