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 - Researchers have calculated the size of carbon dioxide snow particles in the clouds at Mars' poles. The particles are very small, roughly the size of a red blood cell. See article.
g Message - SETI’s Jill Tarter, the inspiration for the movie “Contact,” retired after 30 years as director of research. Alas, she’s not retiring to some other planet, because we still haven’t found intelligent life outside of the Earth, except for on the moon, but those are people we sent there so that doesn’t really count. Still, Tarter’s job was a cool one. See article.
g Cosmicus - Engineers have recently tested the Seeker full-scale rover, a fully autonomous vehicle that charted its own course through Chile's Atacama Desert. The technology could be used in future missions to help robotic explorers roam the surface of planets like Mars. 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.