[ExI] Drake Equation Musings

[John Clark]

On Sun, May 15, 2016  BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​
> The astronomers Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan have an interesting
> paper out where they’ve essentially flipped the Drake Equation on its
> head. If that equation is meant to give us some handle on the
> probability that there are aliens out there, Frank and Sullivan have
> used the plethora of exoplanets discovered since the launch of the
> Kepler space telescope to calculate the chance that, so far, we alone
> have been the only advanced civilization in the 13.7 billion year
> history of the universe. I won’t bore you with actual numbers, but
> they estimate the chance that we’re the first and only is 1 in 10
> billion trillion. I shouldn’t have to tell you that is a really,
> really small number.
>

​
Astronomers alone can never produce a meaningful figure of the likelihood
of ET. Yes astronomy can come up with amazingly big numbers
​ ​
but biology can come up with amazingly small numbers; if you multiply those
2 numbers together do you get a number greater than one? The Great Silence
makes me think the answer is no
​,​
and in the very big (or very small) numbers game Biology is the boss not
Astronomy.

Incidentally
​
 one of the factors in the Drake Equation is not biological or
astronomical, it's the lifetime of a technological civilization.  Donald
Trump may be able to show us
​exactly ​
how that works.
​

 John K Clark​
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