Life Below Zero

National Geographic offers a variety of educational programs on Cable...  one of which that I watch occasionally is Life Below Zero, which focuses on several people living in the remote areas of Alaska.  It tracks how they live:  hunting, building shelters, and planning ahead for the especially harsh winters that take place in these northern territories...  temperatures can drop to 40 below zero sometimes.  Food is harvested by fishing, trapping small animals, and hunting for moose.  A bull moose can feed two people all winter long.  And...  there are huge forests of trees that can provide wood for a fire as well as long that can be used to build a cabin.  

After watching a few episodes, essential tools are:

• dogs for a sled
• a dog sled
• chainsaw
• plastic containers
• rifle and ammunition
• hatchet and knife
• snow skis
• snow mobile
• small boat with motor
• warm clothes 
• gloves and boots
• waders
• small hand tools

IRONICALLY...

I am watching these shows inside my warm house in sweat pants and a short sleeve shirt, drinking coffee, and not really worried about the cold winter months or where my next meal is coming from while supervising the cooking of split pea soup with turkey burgers instead of ham.

YES...

it is true that these people get paid by National Geographic to be filmed as they live their lives, so they are not totally without a source of income to pay for food if they really need it, but it is interesting to watch them as they pretend to be totally self-sufficient.

Alien Civilizations Out There

How many alien civilizations are out there? 

A new galactic survey holds a clue.
The Milky Way is full of habitable real estate, with roughly half of all sunlike stars hosting Earth-size worlds that could be friendly to life.

by Nadia Drake

Here’s a good sign for alien hunters: More than 300 million worlds with similar conditions to Earth are scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. A new analysis concludes that roughly half of the galaxy’s sunlike stars host rocky worlds in habitable zones where liquid water could pool or flow over the planets’ surfaces.

“This is the science result we’ve all been waiting for,” says Natalie Batalha, an astronomer with the University of California, Santa Cruz, who worked on the new study.

The finding, which has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, pins down a crucial number in the Drake Equation. Devised by my father Frank Drake in 1961, the equation sets up a framework for calculating the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way. Now the first few variables in the formula—including the rate of sunlike star formation, the fraction of those stars with planets, and the number of habitable worlds per stellar system—are known.

The number of sunlike stars with worlds similar to Earth “could have been one in a thousand, or one in a million—nobody really knew,” says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute who was not involved with the new study.

Astronomers estimated the number of these planets using data from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. For nine years, Kepler stared at the stars and watched for the brief twinkles produced when orbiting planets blot out a portion of their star’s light. By the end of its mission in 2018, Kepler had spotted some 2,800 exoplanets—many of them nothing like the worlds orbiting our sun.

But Kepler’s primary goal was always to determine how common planets like Earth are. The calculation required help from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which monitors stars across the galaxy. With Gaia’s observations in hand, scientists were finally able to determine that the Milky Way is populated by hundreds of millions of Earth-size planets orbiting sunlike stars—and that the nearest one is probably within 20 light-years of the solar system.   To Read Entire Article, Click Here...

What I find most interesting is the fact that more and more people and organizations are taking this concept of extraterrestrials seriously and accepting it as a real possibility instead of some SCIFI fantasy movie.  In the early 2000's, UFO's and shows like the X-Files made for curious watching by those who somehow found themselves in possession of open minds.  Two decades into the future and now we are seeing the UFO's and extraterrestrials as a real possibility...  even our Federal Government has released files that UFO's are REAL and no longer someone's vivid imagination or weather balloons.

BUT...

there are more pressing questions for some of us, like:

• did extraterrestrials meddle with our DNA?
• did extraterrestrials have sex with human beings?
• do extraterrestrials live among us now?