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 - The last transit of Venus this century will occur June 5-6. The event will provide astrobiologists with the opportunity to view Venus as an example of a transiting exoplanet. See article.
g Life - Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, working in collaboration with Rudolph Schild (Harvard University) and Carl Gibson (UCSD) recently published a theory that argues for the first microbial life in the Universe originating in the watery interiors of primordial planets numbering about 1080 (1 followed by 80 zeros), just a few million years after the Big Bang. See article.
g Intelligence - Chimpanzees are interested in social cohesion and have various strategies to guarantee the stability of their group. Anthropologists now reveal that chimpanzees mediate conflicts between other group members, not for their own direct benefit, but rather to preserve the peace within the group. Their impartial intervention in a conflict - so-called "policing" - can be regarded as an early evolutionary form of moral behavior. See article.
g Message - A while back, the BBC interviewed Ian Morison, coordinator of the Jodrell Bank SETI observations — whose job is to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. 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.