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 - Red dwarfs are smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun. There are more than a dozen of these stars within a few light years of our Earth, yet not one of them is visible to the naked eye. For years it was thought that they were a poor place to look for alien lifeforms. However, recent computer models contradict this supposition. This is excellent news for xenobiologists since four out of every five stars is a red dwarf. See article.
g Abodes - A new study rebuts the hypothesis that an impact event 13,000 years ago brought about dramatic climate change in North America and led to the end of the Clovis culture. See article.
g Intelligence - For the first time, researchers have been able to see a thought "swim" through the brain of a living fish. The new technology is a useful tool for studies of perception. It might even find use in psychiatric drug discovery, according to authors of the study 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.