A while ago there was this program called "Are we alone?" on the National Geographic Channel (NGC). It kept me glued to the idiot box, but left me feeling like I had not gained anything in the way of knowledge by spending my precious one hour watching this show. I even wrote up on the NGC one.
And yesterday there was a program called "Origins" on PBS/NOVA. It dealt with the same question "Are we alone?" But this time I came away feeling like I had learnt so much, the only reason being "Origins" had more science than the NGC show. It made the NGC show look like crap which in turn makes my write up look like crap!
Now coming to the most fascinating part of the program. Professor Frank Drake an American astronomer and astrophysicist has an equation to determine the "Number of communicative civilizations in our galaxy!" How profound is that?
The equation looks like this
Prof. Drake gives values to these variables and estimates N = 10,000! So there maybe that many communicative civilizations. So we may not be alone. You can read more about this at the PBS/NOVA website. I find this totally amazing!!
The program also addressed questions like
Does Mars have life?
How did life begin?
Life's Essential- Water
After watching "Origins" I am very happy to say that "Scientifically it is possible to conclude that we are not alone". That gives me so much more satisfaction than saying "Programs like these always tend to leave me with more information but no more knowledge to conclude either way"
2 comments:
Very interesting! I can't believe the first thing I did was check up the units - haven't done that since high-school physics. I suppose the more important question though is, whats the probability that a civilization that develops communicates with another? That would kind of hinge on a p_L, that being the probability of there being such a thing as faster-than-light-travel (assuming no two Earths are close enough to "commute" using odinary space travel) and a p_d which is the probability of a civilization discovering the means to do so.
Hey Anshul,
'Communication' doesn't necessarily mean travel and personal communication. It could be just sending and receiving some sort of signals. Check this link out http://exoplanets.org/.
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