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 - NASA´s Phoenix lander revealed water ice mere inches beneath the Martian surface, and chemical evidence from the landing site strongly hints that the region is habitable. But learning whether there is life in Martian ice will require drilling and drilling on Mars will be anything but easy. See article.
g Message - We probably already have the technology to find evidence of extraterrestrial life forms and to even send out evidence of our own. If we don't have this capability yet, we certainly will have achieved it within 15 years. See article.
g Cosmicus - In “Leaves of Grass,” famed poet Walt Whitman wrote of a "strange huge meteor-procession." Now, using forensic astronomy, researchers may have rediscovered one of the most famous celestial events of Whitman's day. See article.
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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.