Life Beyond:

The Drake Equation suggests that the chances of there being "somebody else out there" are pretty good, if we can only find their signal.

Of course, it is a very rough probability-calculating equation, based on several estimates, not physics, where the equations are motivated by preceding equations and can be demonstrated to produce reproducible results that agree well with both theory and with real observations.

However the uncertainties may stand, the possibility itself is intriguing. In Dec 1994, David Gedye (a Seattle-area computer scientist who had gotten his MS at UC Berkeley) had a conversation at a Christmas party about doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers. But he followed through: in the following year, he contacted Woody Sullivan at UW (one of my old profs), who steered him to a SETI researcher at Berkeley, and together the Washington and Berkeley folks organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea.

In 1996, A David Twohy script, "The Arrival" was released as a science fiction film with Charlie Sheen as the obsessed SETI astronomer who at one point takes over a neighborhood's satellite dishes to try to track down a signal he thinks is of extraterrestrial origin. It's a very cool moment in a movie that was not as successful as it deserved to be. Interest in this subject as an achievable goal is possibly greater now than it has ever been. The SETI@Home project needs YOU! Look at the flood of data they are facing More Data in Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Find your own favorite SETI project, including its homepage hotlink and proper citations

and post it with some discussion of what the project is,

how they are going to detect ET life (intelligent or not-so-much!),

and your impression of the project from your readings. Is it a worth-while project? Is it worth the funding?

Make sure that your Subject line describes your post!

Life Within our System:

The field of Astrobiology has been a growing over the years. This is the search for life in our Solar System and beyond: Astrobiology What is most interesting is the extreme lifeforms we have discovered here on Earth - called extremophiles, these "lovers of the extreme" can live in some of the harshest environments here on Earth - thus they might be the most likely type of life that we would find on say Mars or some of the moons of our solar system. If you pick this topic:

Tell us what kind of life we might discover on one of the planets/moon within our Solar System

pick a single planet/moon and tell us the conditions there (it could be a single location on that body) and what kind of life might thrive there

are there any missions that are in the works to make these discoveries? Are these missions worth the cost?

provide all references used with citations

pur-new-sol

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