Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Greenhouse gasses on Earth Mark I and the psychology of extraterrestrial communication

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - In the early days of the solar system, our sun would not have been hot enough to keep the Earth from freezing. However, liquid water was present on the early Earth. Now, scientists believe that greenhouse gasses may have played a role in keeping Earth's oceans from freezing over completely. See article.
g Message - Although the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has yet to detect a signal, the efforts continue because so little of the possible parameter space has been searched so far. See article.
g Aftermath - Almost no serious study seems to have been made of the psychology of extraterrestrial communication - presumably on the basis that xenopsychology, xenoanthropology or xenolinguistics (terms seemingly used only by science fiction enthusiasts and game designers) need some cases to work on before anything useful can be written. Although it might be argued that the theoretical challenges for communication are clear enough to commence such work. See article.

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2 comments:

Steve said...

Of course the search goes on, far as we know space is infinite right? There has to be some kind of life out there, I do believe there are Aliens, it's just a matter of time before we find them right? Well I guess as our technology gets better.

Rob Bignell said...

You're qquite right to point out that technology is a major barrier to first contact. With better technology, we could scan more stars for radio signals, identify stars with Earth-like planets and ultimately launch interplanetary probes (even if they're only robots), all bringing us closer to determining just where ETI is. But I would also suggest that WILLPOWER is an even greater barrier. We could have had all of this technology years ago or almost ready to launch if only so much of humanity wasn't more interested in goals and concerns that were far less lofty.