After I took some time in December to visit with friends, family, and wade into some unexplored spiritual waters, the year Two Thousand and Eight on the Gregorian calendar finished itself in short order.

Two Thousand and Nine jumped in quick-like, much akin to a popped clutch, and we’re almost already one twelfth of the way through it. I can’t tell if time is moving quickly or slowly but it seems to be mattering less and less to me.

On the other hand, for yours truly there is something that is mattering more and more. Casual observers will note the productivity and posting levels on this blog have been quite slack. They seem to be suffering from a terrible drought and sadly things around here have really withered on the vine (and frankly I’ve never been a big fan of raisins). So in the interest of carrying the botanical metaphor too far, let’s splash some droplets of water on our thirsty mental roots and see if anything perks up.

And so…

Here’s an interesting video on the concept of the “multiverse” courtesy of Google and the BBC.

Tags: Astronomy, BBC, Big Bang, Cosmic Constant, Cosmos, Evolution, Martin Rees, Multiverse

On a clear night, if you ever get a chance to get out from underneath the hazy sodium-vapor glow shed by our friendly neighborhood streetlights, you’ll have the opportunity to see a potentially mind numbing sight: about 6000 twinkling stars with the possible bonus of a planet or two.  This view still effectively renders me gobsmacked in what must appear to any outsider as a hilarious form of drool producing paralysis.  And as I stand or lay there slackjawed and stupefied, gazing up towards the heavens, I cannot help but wonder – is there life out there?

 

Last year, just before I came out to Chicago, I had an awesome opportunity to geek-out hardcore when I went to witness a talk by the legendary physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking at the lecture halls near Seattle Science Center.  I didn’t really know what to expect, but I left feeling confident that I would never forget being in the midst of 1500 nerds generating micro-vibrations from near orgasmic ecstasy.  And out of the quivering chaos emerged some sort of ethereal resonance where the resulting shockwaves achieved critical expression.  I had to clear my ears several times from the resulting pressure changes within the room, and indeed, I believe the site was ground zero for the seismologic recordings occurring simultaneously at the University of Washington a few miles away.   Far from being annoyed by all of this I took it in stride.  After all, these are and always will be my people.

Hawking is fairly iconic, so most people are aware of his condition and the Olympic way in which his mind has triumphed over the matter of his physical limitations.  Hawking suffers from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (AKA motor neuron disease) which is a disease where the motor neurons begin degenerating and the muscles eventually weaken over time as they stop being used.  In its acute stages, ALS renders victims immobile.

Towards the end of Hawking’s lecture time, instead of a question and answer session, he used his electronic voicebox to respond to common questions he’d received over the years.  One of them involved the chances of life on other planets.  Dr. Hawking speculated that we are probably not alone.  This part of the talk stuck with me because it jogged my memory of “Drake’s equation” also known as the “Green Bank equation.”

Drake’s equation is a formula where you plug in a bunch of numbers to determine how many civilizations you might find in a galaxy (not just “life”).  You have representations of such things as the average rate of star formation in a galaxy (R*), the fraction of those stars that have planets(fp), the number of planets that can support life per star that has planets (ne), the number of those that actually go on to develop life at some point (fe), and so on…

There’s a cool calculator that lets you play with these numbers here.  Of course, any critically minded person ought to take the formula with a grain of salt, but it helps provide a starting point for wrapping our head around how many ET neighbors we might have.

Most of the estimates I’ve seen put our Milky Way galaxy at about 100 billion stars.  A number so challenging to imagine, that your mind glazes over it and instead works on the sentence in a paragraph without missing a beat.  So to give you a little more substance to chew on check out this image:

Courtesy of: www.crunchweb.net/87billion

I like this picture because it to gives a little more perspective by showing what $87 billion dollars (the amount President Bush asked for on September 7th, 2003 for the war in Iraq) in one dollar bills looks like stacked up next to a little guy and a car.  Now if you convert those 87 billion one dollar bills into stars, you get close to the 100 billion that represents the Milky Way’s star particulates.

Using the Drake’s equation calculator, with all the settings pegged to the lowest numbers provided, we still end up with 3 civilizations – and that is for a galaxy with only 1 billion stars.  When we consider that there are may be around 100 billion galaxies in the universe that’s 300 billion civilizations.  1 million civilizations seems like a lot to me.  Heck, even 10,000 seems like a lot.

So if there are or were other civilizations, what does it say about homo-sapien-sapien’s place in all of this?

Tags: Astronomy, civilization, drake's equation, galactic, galaxy, green bank, scale, stars, universe