Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073, which is found in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster). Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a similar barred spiral, and the study of galaxies such as NGC 1073 helps astronomers learn more about our celestial home. See article.
g Intelligence - A team of international archeologists, led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has documented a series of more than 7,500-year-old fish seines and traps near Moscow. The equipment found, among the oldest in Europe, displays a great technical complexity. The survey will allow us to understand the role of fishing among the European settlements by early Holocene (10,000 years ago), especially in those areas where inhabitants did not practice agriculture until nearly the Iron Age. See article.
g Message - Here’s the classic paper published in Nature that initiated in 1959 the age of Electromagnetic SETI: “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison. See article.
g Learning - Life's origin and existence in the universe are among the most profound riddles ever facing science. ILASOL is an Israeli scientific society devoted to these issues. ILASOL's yearly meeting gathers physicists, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, philosophers and researchers of other disciplines present works related to life's origin and astrobiology. Presentations are peer-reviewed in order to guarantee high scientific level, while enabling a friendly forum for novel and unorthodox ideas to be aired and assessed. 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.