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 - Using a global circulation model, scientists have determined why Titan has what looks like an enormous white arrow on its surface. See article.
g Life - All life on Earth relies on a standard set of 20 amino acids to build the proteins that carry out life's essential actions. But did it have to be this way? See article.
g Message - The Billion-channel ExtraTerrestrial Assay (BETA) is a radioastronomical search for microwave beacons from intelligent civilizations. It searches the 1400-1720 MHz "waterhole" region with 0.5 Hz resolution for narrow-band carriers. BETA incorporates several systems for terrestrial radio frequency interference mitigation: a terrestrial "veto" feed, two sky feeds to detect sidereal motion, and adaptive filtering to reduce intermittent interference. The search has surveyed the entire sky from +60 deg. to -30 deg. decliniation twice and is starting a third. During this time it has sifted through ~ 1016 frequency bins, followed by ~ 109 candidate features and archived 3500 of these which passed preliminary tests. No candidate has repeated or otherwise presents the assumed characteristics of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin. 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.