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 - New research has shown that meteor smoke may play a role in the formation of noctilucent clouds on Earth. See article.
g Intelligence - In a pair of Discover magazine articles, biologist E.O. Wilson and science journalist John Horgan take on the question "Is War Inevitable." While they come to opposite conclusions, they bracket the modern answers to this ancient question. Both positions make for fascinating reading, but there is another possibility that one philosopher says comes only by looking at life in its largest, planetary systems context. See article.
g Cosmicus - For many years man has looked up to the sky and wondered: Are We Alone? As Curiosity - the Mars rover - landed safely on the Red Planet, we have high hopes of solving this age-old mystery. But this is not the first time for us as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been a fixation since the 1960s. ET picks the landmark missions. See article.
Get your SF book manuscript edited
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.