Posted on 12/29/2018 3:45:29 PM PST by BenLurkin
For the precocious hunter of off-Earth life, the Drake equation is the ever-ready, go-to toolkit for estimating just how (not) lonely humans are in the Milky Way galaxy. The equation was developed by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961 in a slight hurry so that attendees of an upcoming conference would have something to confer about, and it breaks down the daunting question "Are we alone?" into more manageable, bite-size chunks.
The equation starts with some straightforward concepts, such as the rate of star formation and the fraction of stars hosting planets. But it quickly moves into tricky terrain, asking for numbers like what fraction of those planets that could host life actually end up evolving intelligent species and what fraction of those planets blast out friendly signals into the cosmos, inviting us Earthlings to a nice little chat.
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For the Drake equation, we simply have no idea about the uncertainties attached to any of the parameters. What fraction of planets where life could get started eventually develop life? Zero percent? 100 percent? Somewhere in between? Is it 50 percent plus or minus 5 percent? Or plus or minus 25 percent? Or plus 5 percent and minus 25 percent?
And it takes only one unknown uncertainty to sink the whole enterprise. You may chip away at the Drake equation over the course of decades, taking careful observation after careful observation, measuring star-formation rates, hunting for liquid water on planetary surfaces, the works. You may think you're making good progress on nailing down this prediction, but as long as a single parameter still has unknown uncertainty, you haven't made any progress.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Besides the size of the Earth and a habitable distance from the Sun, these features include its elemental composition, a sufficiently large amount of liquid water, the composition and thickness of Earth’s atmosphere, the rate of rotation on its axis, the strength of the magnetic field, the amount of actinide radioisotopes for coredecay heat, the movement of the tectonic plates, the thickness of Earth’s crust, the size, density, orbital distance and tidal action of Earth’s moon, the nearly circular orbit of the Earth around the sun, the tilt of Earth’s axis, the ratio of land-to-ocean surface area, the arrangement of continents relative to the slight eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and axis, the orbital plane of Earth and the other planets around the sun, the size and relative position of the large gaseous planets, like Jupiter and Saturn relative to that of the Earth and the inner planets, the orbital locations of asteroid and planetoid groups, the lack of large planets inside the Earth’s orbit, the elemental composition of our sun, the age and size of our sun, the heliosphere of the sun, the position of our solar system with respect to the galactic arms, the relative position of our solar system from any supernovas, the location of our solar system relative to the galactic center, and the size and shape of our galaxy. No doubt more could be listed.
These factors and many others suggest that, with all the planets associated with the billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, the estimated probable number of planets with Earth-like conditions hospitable to intelligent life is likely very close to the experimentally known value of one.
...and They Are Spectacular!
Yup, that's what evaluating the elements of Drake equation strongly implies...
Yup! It’s hard hard to extrapolate from an example of exactly one.
Freegards
We’re still a primitive species barely out of the Stone Age. SETI would never detect Quantum entanglement communication in a thousand years. As far as speed of light being a barrier, wormholes or some future technology might overcome it. The thought of going faster than the speed of sound was an impossible dream and considered witchcraft a couple of hundred years ago. Who knows what we will discover a thousand years from now? Technology is advancing at an unbelievable pace. Discoveries beyond anyone’s wildest dreams are coming to fruition.
In the decade or so since Michael Crichton passed away we’ve been able to get an accurate value for one of the terms, nearly every star surveyed for gravitational wobble has been found to have planets.
That’s the value of the Drake equation, it provides a framework telling us what we don’t know, what we need to find out, and where each new data point fits in the whole scheme of things.
We know almost nothing about chemical evolution (why do we have only L-amino acids? why do we have only D-sugars? it takes proteins to make nucleic acids and nucleic acids to specify the composition of proteins - what came first, functional proteins or functional nucleic acids? etc).
And until we know the mechanism of chemical evolution, we can’t even speculate on the odds of it occurring in a given setting.
And if we don’t know those odds, it doesn’t matter how many stars exist or what fraction have planets, we’re operating completely in the dark: if there are 10^60 stars, and the odds of the chemicals required for life developing in the fashion that occurred on earth are 10^(-61), then we’re probably it (and if those odds are 10^(-50), we may have plenty of company). But we just don’t know, and it doesn’t look like we’re anywhere close to knowing.
Thanks. Looks good.
The point of the equation is to identify the parameters. It does that just fine. People trying to use it to solve unsolvable problems are the cause of their own frustration. In a sense, the equation tells us that it’s not a problem we can come close to solving with the amount of data on hand, or that can be expected to be on hand at any forseeable point in the future.
Basically, it’s a warning not to go down the very rabbit hole the author went down. Some things shouldn’t be taken 100% literally and the Drake Equation is one of them.
It has the added bonus of re-enforcing the image of a nuclear boogieman.
The Pelozi Paradox:
Every civilization develops liberalism.
No civilization can survive liberalism.
I don’t remember that in the show. Hmm. Oh, well, does this mean Belldandy is available? :p
>> If we survive 10000 more years, that’s only a spherical radius of 10000 light years for us to be detected.<<
Well, that’s the requirement for the civilization to be detected while it is still present. But the civilization could still be detected long after it’s gone.
Frankly, I would argue that once a civilization achieves independent colonies, it’ll be virtually impossible to destroy.
An interesting wrinkle in the Drake equation:
We are at the very center, and therefore the very oldest point of the universe.
This is no real excuse for the Fermi paradox: there’s no reason to suspect that life couldn’t evolve a tiny smidgeon faster than on Earth, what, with all the mass-extinction events we’ve had.
And no, I’m not arguing for Aristotelean cosmology.
It’s a simple quirk of relativity, that wherever an observer is that is the absolute center of the universe, and therefore the point where time has flowed the fastest, making it also the oldest point of the universe.
I knew it!
This is definitely true!
My relatives are all old as hell too!
HP Lovecraft theorized that beings capable of interstellar travel would be so far advanced from us, that we would find them completely incomprehensible. We may be discovered by Cthulhu rather than Romulans.
What might a tribe of howler monkeys think of a bunch of humans setting up a drill rig in their jungle?
Life doesn’t happen by itself. There may be compatible planets, but that doesn’t mean life. By the same token, that we exist, other intelligent life could have been created.
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