Tag: Torn MacAlester

Intro­duc­tion: Drake equa­tion devel­oped the equa­tion:   where is the rate of star for­ma­tion,  is the frac­tion of stars that have plan­ets, aver­age num­ber of plan­ets per star that could sup­port life,  is the frac­tion of plan­ets that have life, is the frac­tion hav­ing intel­li­gent life,  is the frac­tion that devel­ops suf­fi­cient tech­nol­o­gy, and is the life­time for the civ­i­liza­tion. The para­me­ter  is the num­ber of civ­i­liza­tions in the galaxy. This equa­tion is a series of para­me­ters when mul­ti­plied togeth­er account for all the fac­tors lead­ing to a civ­i­liza­tion capa­ble of inter­stel­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Despite a lot of tan­ta­liz­ing clues, we have […]

Fea­tured Pansper­mia Some­thing inter­est­ing occurred in the late 1960’s as part of the Apol­lo pro­gram.  The uncrewed probe Sur­vey­or 3 was land­ed in the Ocean of storms in 1967. Part of the Apol­lo 12 mis­sion, the sec­ond crewed land­ing in 1969, was to retrieve engi­neer­ing sam­ples from Sur­vey­or 3. That mis­sion was a suc­cess, but that is only the begin­ning of the sto­ry. For two years, Sur­vey­or had unin­tend­ed pas­sen­gers wait­ing on the sur­face of the Moon for 31 months. They were bac­te­ria spores that man­aged to sur­vive in the vac­u­um of space.  The very fact of their sur­vival begs […]

Fea­tured Sci­ence Fic­tion and the Drake Equa­tion I start­ed think­ing about one of the clas­sic authors of sci­ence fic­tion, and the set­ting he cre­at­ed for some of his sto­ries.  I often won­dered what the impli­ca­tions for the Drake equa­tion would be in that par­tic­u­lar set­ting. I’ve tak­en a sub­set of the sto­ries for this set­ting, since not all of the sto­ry set­tings are self-con­sis­tent.  Let me review the three con­di­tions from four books: Human­i­ty dis­cov­ers that there are ancient alien civ­i­liza­tions on both Mars and Venus. Life is found on Ganymede. The first two inter­stel­lar loca­tions vis­it­ed by human­i­ty have […]