Are We Too Young Of A Civilization To Matter To Eti And Santa Fe Crater

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 - A large meteorite impact can have a profound effect on life. The explosive force is often compared to a nuclear detonation, and the debris tossed high into the atmosphere can alter our planet's climate. In the mountains of New Mexico, scientists have found evidence for an ancient meteorite strike - even though the impact crater is long gone. See article.

g LIFE - Life flourishes in many environments, including some in which human beings could not possibly survive. To discover extraterrestrial life, it will be useful to know the physical and chemical limits for life on Earth and the underlying biophysical laws. See article. This article is from 2005.

g INTELLIGENCE - Freeman Dyson is betting that alien life doesn't live on a world like yours. More specifically, if you check out the tentative wager this celebrated physicist has logged at the Web site www.longbets.org, you'll see that Dyson's hunch is that the first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be made someplace other than on a planet or on a satellite of a planet. See article. This article is from 2002.

g MESSAGE - Suppose we do find a pattern in the radio or optical signals from ETI. How will we be able to understand ET when we don't share a common natural language, like English, Spanish or Swahili? See article. This article is from 2001.

g COSMICUS - Ever want to discover a new world? That's what we are a planning to have folks do with PlanetQuest, a distributed computing screen saver that will allow anyone to find extrasolar planets on their own computer. See article.

g LEARNING - Here's a neat video courtesy of NASA: "What is a Planet?". The video drives along the "Kuiper Belt highway" at 100 mph to explore the far reaches of our solar system and discover how vast our corner of the galaxy really is.

g AFTERMATH - What could a young civilization like ours possibly have to offer in an intellectual exchange across interstellar space? Surely advanced aliens would have little to gain from our understanding of astronomy or physics, chemistry or mathematics. What then might we say to hold up our end of an interstellar conversation? See article. This article is from 2008.

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