Aliens? Really?!

Following what I started yesterday, let's get look at another topic that makes the rounds in popular astronomy, Aliens. Now, personally, I believe in probability. So, I'm interested in the drake equation, a probabilistic look at alien life. The drake equation takes into account a total of 7 factors, of which we'll look at the fraction of that planets per star could support life. After studying a star, astronomers can define a circumstellar habitable zone or more commonly known as the Goldilocks zone, as a region around the star where a planet can support liquid water. Too close and the planet's water will evaporate and too far and it's water will condense into ice. And this zone is at different distances for different stars given that the brightness of stars varies from one to another. Why is the presence of liquid water essential for life? Are there life forms that are supported by other compounds? These are valid questions to which I don't currently have answers. Maybe you can give me an answer if you do.

Moving on, how can we detect alien life on extra-solar planets? Astronomers are currently studying the atmospheres of extra-solar planets they observe and by studying it's spectrum, they can infer what the atmospheric composition of the planet is. We can then look for compounds that support life on earth to search for life on the extra-solar planet. This is not a conclusive proof but it's a beginning. Maybe aliens will discover humans before we discover them, based the radio waves we're sending out into space, as illustrated in this comic by abstruse goose. Search for hypothetical Dyson spheres are another way of searching for (advanced) alien life. You could also look at the work at Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute or SETI Institute.

You could also read what Randall Munroe, of the webcomic xkcd, has to say about this.

Popular posts from this blog

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Read more