Protoplanetary Discs Of The Orion Nebula And The Psychology Of Interstellar Communication

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 collection of 30 never-before-released images of embryonic planetary systems in the Orion Nebula are the highlight of the longest single Hubble Space Telescope project ever dedicated to the topic of star and planet formation. Also known as proplyds, or protoplanetary discs, these modest blobs surrounding baby stars are shedding light on the mechanism behind planet formation. See article.g LIFE - A team of researchers from the Astrobiology Centre has shown that hydrogen cyanide, urea and other substances considered essential to the formation of the most basic biological molecules can be obtained from the salt Prussian blue. See article.g COSMICUS - Quote of the Day: "Realizing that outside your spacecraft or spacesuit you would not survive more than 15 seconds, you sense the extreme hostility of most of the universe towards life. Seeing the thinness of our atmosphere and realizing that this is all that separates us from the hostility of space, you may feel a new regard for the fragility of life on our planet." - Jeffrey Hoffman, NASA space shuttle astronautg IMAGINING - Looking for some classic science fiction alien movies? Here's a fairly exhaustive list, with brief explanations of each. Now in how each one the aliens really are just mythical monsters that play on human psychology (specifically fear or revulsion). Such films really say less about the evolution of potential extraterrestrial lifeforms and civilizations than about the evolution of human beings and our culture.g AFTERMATH - If we establish communication with a civilization even as close as 100 light years from Earth, the round-trip time for a message and its reply is 200 years. What will be the psychology of a civilization that can engage in a meaningful conversation with this sort of delay? How is such a conversation to be established? What should the content of such a conversation be? These are the questions which motivate our title: "Minds and Millennia: The Psychology of Interstellar Communication." See article.Get your SF book manuscript edited