60 years later, is it time to update the Drake equation?

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-years-drake-equation.html

by elorant • 5 years ago

62 141 5 years ago

Grustaf4• 5 years ago

No, it's time to scrap it, since it never made any sense. You can't talk about probabilities when there's only a single trial, the sample size is 1 and you have no possible way to determine the parameters in the first place.

Out_of_Characte• 5 years ago

While true that the last parameters are completely unknown (IE, wether a planet with life has intelligent life, and wether they have radio transmission capabilities) the other parameters are something we can most certainly estimate. The absense of precision in this case is why it was written in the first place.

"As I planned the meeting, I realized a few day[s] ahead of time we needed an agenda. And so I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it's going to be to detect extraterrestrial life. And looking at them, it became pretty evident that if you multiplied all these together, you got a number, N, which is the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy. This was aimed at the radio search, and not to search for primordial or primitive life forms."

So the sample size isn't 1 and there are known ways to detect all but 2 or 3 parameters of the drake equation.

jcranmer• 5 years ago

So the sample size isn't 1 and there are known ways to detect all but 2 or 3 parameters of the drake equation.

Actually, only 2 or 3 parameters of the Drake equation are estimable. (It depends on how you want to define "planets that can potentially support life"--you can argue that the answer is anywhere between 1 and 5 in our own solar system). Everything that talks about the possibility of life evolving, let alone speculating about how it will evolve or the xenosociology of what that life will try to do, is pure conjecture: that's the last 4 values of the equation, more than half of it.

Grustaf4• 5 years ago

Ok, you can say that the sample size is the number of planets, but there’s only 1 trial.

EDIT:

If you go through the factors, only the first three even make sense to talk about. And the third, about "number of planets per star that can potentially support life" can only be discussed in terms of our particular form of life. We have no idea at all what other types of life there could be, much less under what conditions that might happen.

The others are completely unknowable. For example:

f_i: The fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)"

I'm embarrassed even writing it out. How can anyone even start to think that they could come even with 10 orders of magnitude of the right answer, if it's even a well defined probability, which I doubt.

We know of exactly one planet with life, and it has intelligent life that emits radio waves. Is that an inevitability, or a one in a trillion fluke?

But what bother me the most is how you even think you can talk about probabilities when there's only one trial, and for the later factors, the sample size is most definitely 1. It's just inane.

kelnos2• 5 years ago

You absolutely can talk about probabilities, and it's an interesting thought experiment. You just can't -- yet -- plug in meaningful numbers derived from experimental data.

Grustaf4• 5 years ago

Yet? How could you ever hope to be able to say anything about the last five factors until you find another civilisation? By which time you have the answer anyway.

pitched• 5 years ago

You can’t really get any precision out of it but I think the size of the error bars is interesting, where recent estimates come out somewhere between 10^-13 and 10^8. That makes it a bit more likely that we’re alone than not.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Estimates

mvzvm• 5 years ago

The Drake Equation always felt like gibberish to me. How can you have an equation "used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy" when we have nothing to test it with?

vimacs2• 5 years ago

I have to disagree. It is useful to be able to quantify the exact state of ignorance that we currently have and as our observational reach expands, the values of the variables in the equation should become less and less fuzzy.

The problem isn't with the Drake equation, it's with the pop science articles that extrapolated things from it way beyond the original intent or scope.

treeman79• 5 years ago

Several sets of unknown on an infinite universe, so we know know nothing.

However thanks to speed of light the data set is not infinite, just absurd.

So we know almost nothing.

Given time the expansion of the universe will push all galaxies and stars away from us. The data set will be 1.

We now know everything.

As expansion continues all hydrogen items will eventually break apart. All life has ended.

Nothing now knows us.

kelnos2• 5 years ago

You can certainly have it, you just can't use it with any sense of accuracy until you have more data.

nend• 5 years ago

Take a look at the article:

"Rather than being an actual means for quantifying the number of intelligent species in our galaxy, the purpose of the equation was meant to frame the discussion on SETI. In addition to encapsulating the challenges facing scientists, it was intended to stimulate scientific dialog among those attending the meeting. As Drake would later remark:..."

Then follows a video of Drake speaking.

delecti• 5 years ago

It's a thought experiment meant to highlight known unknowns. If we could perfectly measure each field, we would necessarily have an idea of the number of intelligent civilizations. Each term raises interesting questions, even if they can't be precisely measured (or even guessed at with any confidence).

sigg3• 5 years ago

It's like rejecting quantum superpositions because you're fond of cats.

s1artibartfast5• 5 years ago

But we do have ways of testing it. We can and do look for extraterrestrial civilizations coming from nearby planets and solar systems, and thereby place bonds on the output of the Drake Equation.

For some combinations of parameters, we should expect to see life on most other bodies within the solar system. The search for life on the moon and mars are simple empirical tests of these predictions.

neolog2• 5 years ago

nothing to test it with

What do you mean here?

optimalsolver• 5 years ago

Learned about this equation from the late Michael Crichton's book "Sphere". A really great first contact science fiction story.

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

Mandatory to mention when talking about Sphere: read the book first, then watch the movie if you feel so inclined. The book is very very good, the movie is okay but so much of the book takes place in the characters' heads that most of the plot is lost in the film.

lordnacho• 5 years ago

I'm a bit surprised at the criticism. I always thought of it as more of an equation template than a very specific equation. Of course if you take a specific version of it, there are things it won't capture that we discover over time. But the idea that we can take a very large number and whittle it down seems reasonable.

_rpd• 5 years ago

Yes, it's inspired a lot of investigations and discussions, which was exactly its purpose. See also: 'solutions' to the Fermi Paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

jawns3• 5 years ago

I don't have any philosophic objections to the existence of extraterrestrial life, but what does bug me is when people claim that simply because the universe is so big, that somehow makes it not only likely but practically certain that life has developed on other planets or in other solar systems or galaxies. That kind of thinking presumes some very important information that we just don't have. We are currently unable to enter any coherent value into the portion of the Drake Equation that pertains to how frequently life arises from non-life.

We have an admittedly very limited knowledge of events outside of our own planet, but so far as we know, abiogenesis has occurred only once, and from that one event, all life on Earth proceeded. (It's possible that abiogenesis occurred independently multiple times during the beginning of life on Earth, but I don't think we yet have a compelling argument that it must have happened more than once.)

My favorite analogy:

Suppose you see a number with this pattern:

0.1001000101001000101001000___

What would you say is the likelihood that a 1 is the next number in the sequence? Not that hard to compute a probability, is it?

But suppose you see a number with this pattern:

0.1000000000000000000000000___

What is the likelihood that a 1 is the next number in the sequence? You could say the odds are 1-in-25, but that doesn't takes into account the clear pattern we see in the sequence. Unless and until we start to see some more ones pop up, it's reasonable to assume that this is a sequence of infinite zeroes, or at the very least that it could perfectly well be a sequence of infinite zeroes. Suppose the sequence goes on for many trillions of numerals. No one's going to say, "Well, if there are trillions of 0s, it's highly unlikely that there won't be some 1s sprinkled in there somewhere."

kadoban3• 5 years ago

If there are no more 1s, then we need to answer why our position in the universe is unique. That seems like a hard question to answer. It just seems like a _much_ better bet that we aren't the only 1.

Smithalicious• 5 years ago

This reasoning seems flawed, how is it that an answer that doesn't lead to difficult questions is more likely (rather than simply more convenient)?

tsimionescu8• 5 years ago

There doesn't have to be an answer. We could just be "the first"[0] life to evolve - someone always has to be. Now, if we were to say that ours is the only life to exist in the entire past and future history of the universe, that would probably require a more specific explanation.

[0] to the extent that events across vast spans of space can be said to be ordered

jawns3• 5 years ago

The "why" might be more of a philosophical question than a scientific question, but in terms of the science, I don't think it's hard to reason about.

Ultimately, the frequency at which abiogenesis occurs is 1/N.

It may be the case that N is small enough that the universe is positively teaming with life.

Or it may be the case that N is so unfathomably large that the odds are exceedingly small that abiogenesis occurs even once during the lifetime of the universe, and the universe just happened to get lucky.

But until we have some other confirmed, observed instance of abiogenesis, we can say nothing about N other than its lower bound is pretty large.

And I don't think we can pile probabilities on top of probabilities to say, "Well, we have no way of knowing how large N is, so I'm going to just bet that it's medium-sized."

colordrops• 5 years ago

Question: is it possible that the universe is geared for DNA based life to emerge through abiogenesis? Just as the same crystals form under the same circumstances no matter where you are, perhaps DNA based life is the same, just a fundamental standard pattern you can find through abiogenesis at multiple points in time and location. Why do we presume that our form of life is so special?

jawns3• 5 years ago

I don't think it entails presumption that our form of life is special to say, "You can't determine frequency based on a single data point."

saas_sam5• 5 years ago

I don't think this is a very good analogy because we know far more about the nature of life, what is required to make it, and the abundance of those ingredients throughout the cosmos. Life isn't a lengthy, specific sequence of precise things. It's a phenomenon that occurs when certain kinds of things come together in certain kinds of ways -- many variations of these ingredients and permutations exist on Earth alone.

Your perspective reminds me of the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

The popular conception is the "puddle analogy." You can imagine a rain puddle becoming conscious, seeing the intricacies of its perfect fit with the pavement that surrounds it and concluding "wow, this hole fits me SO perfectly, it must have been made for me."

tsimionescu8• 5 years ago

many variations of these ingredients and permutations exist on Earth alone.

Apart from cells, what are you referring to here? Especially, is there anything that can be considered "somewhat living" that is not a by-product of regular life, which as far as we know has only ever appeared (or thrived) once Earth's history?

rektide• 5 years ago

The amazing thing about the Drake Equation is that it's a funneling pipeline where we're spitballing numbers with huge orders of magnitudes difference across different people's guesses. They're just random guesses, where one person says one particular odds are one in a million, the other guy says one in a billion, the other gal says one in a trillion. Yet in spite of a huge range, for each of the winnowing factors in this funnel, the odds of there being life are often significant.

Which is to say, two things are certainly true:

The universe is incredibly fantastically basically unimaginably vast. Practically countless (~10 million estimated) super-clusters of galaxies dot the heavens. There's just so many chances, so many opportunities, so much probability that, if you believe in life arising from a primordial soup, seem almost certain to be replicated.

Sometimes chaos, in it's fumbling teaming randomness, happens upon patterns. Patterns which sometimes stick, which sometimes reproduce, which sometimes grow. Entropy amid complex systems sometimes produces it's own enclaves of stability, sometimes.

The other true fact is that time is long and deep. Life on earth is not a flash in the pan, not an instant thing; it emerged slowly, over time, in differing waves, across time. The promise that life, once began, has a chance to ride these waves of time & to become significant, that it grows to fill rich biodiverse roles, grows to complete, that it thrives: if we believe in the soup of life, believe in the complex chemistries that powers cells, and believe in time, then a belief in other life seems not certain, but to me, highly highly probable.

CoolGuySteve• 5 years ago

We have another datapoint though, the age of the Earth. Life started fairly early after the Earth cooled, about a billion years after initial formation. This implies that abiogensis could have happened several times since then and died out; created the same chemical system independently; was out-competed by regular DNA life; or they're around but we just haven't discovered alternative forms of life on earth.

But life capable of communicating across space didn't arrive until 4.5 billions years and after several mass extinctions. Even on a cosmic scale that's a very long time.

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

Drake equation needs to take in consideration more factors, for sure.

Stars have lifecycles, and they can only support life in a stable manner in some stages of that lifecycle.

I guess Drake just assumed that stars lifecycles have such a slow progression that for the purposes of determining alien life we can just assume it is constant.

ProAm• 5 years ago

Stars have lifecycles, and they can only support life in a stable manner in some stages of that lifecycle.

That is what the 'L' is in the formula

ud_0• 5 years ago

I think (hope?) the Drake equation was never intended as a tool for making realistic estimations, I always thought it was more of a first approximation of how one might go about thinking about modeling when all you have is a sample of one.

Specifically the rate of star formation has always been dubious, because there is such an enormous lag between star formation and the emergence of intelligent life (even if we turn out to be an extremely slow outlier), making it unsuitable for estimating the amount of civilizations active at a specific point in time.

My personal drake equation would include only factors that are based on the current state of the galaxy. But that's the Drake equation doing its job: making people think about cosmic odds. It doesn't need an update, because I argue it shouldn't be taken literally in the first place.

A few times a year, authors put out "new" estimations of the number of galactic civilizations, and to do that there is really not much alternative to chaining together these kinds of probabilities. While they sometimes may or more often may not use the actual Drake equation to do it, its value lies in the basic structure, not in its specific implementation.

ghaff3• 5 years ago

One of the challenges (I won't say problems) with the Drake Equation is we have some sense for some numbers and they're very very large. Which encourages people to use formulations for some of the other terms like "even if we assume this is one in a billion" and this is "one in a million," you still come up with a significant number of civilizations. When, in fact, some other term may be so vanishingly small that it's only happened once. (Or there may be something else, e.g. a great barrier, that's not being taken into account.)

But, as others have written, it's not really intended to be used that way.

derekp7• 5 years ago

Is it valid to take a data point of one, combined with a time element to get an estimate? For example Earth started gaining life shortly (in geological time) after it was able to sustain it. That would indicate that either life arises easily, or that it pre existed the Earth and got seeded (panspermia).

Then at the opposite end of the scale is the long time that it took for life to go multi-cellular, and for a space program to be formed by an instance of that life.

ghaff3• 5 years ago

That would indicate that either life arises easily

Not really. While suggestive, all it indicates is that it arose on earth easily.

tsimionescu8• 5 years ago

Well, we know life on earth is at least 3.7 billion years old, but it's not much clear how much older. Since the earth is 4.5 billion years old, that means that life could have appeared after ~17% of its life span so far, which is not THAT little. Furthermore, even if life appeared as early as the earliest estimate - just a few million years after the earth formed - we have no evidence that abiogenesis continued happening after an initial event, or that it happened anywhere except an initial location.

Those two factors may mean that abiogenesis could be an extremely unlikely event that randomly happened to occur very early in the Earth's life span.

pie4204• 5 years ago

Your line of thinking is exactly what's wrong. The fact that life emerged on earth shortly after being able to sustain life says absolutely nothing about likelihood. It could be a very likely thing. Or it could be a 1 in a 10^35 miracle that happened due to an insanely low probability event involving gamma rays hitting chemical reactions in just the right way. Until we solve abiogenesis and can demonstrably evolve life from abiotic matter, or observe other planets with life on them, this is all speculation.

paxys2• 5 years ago

This would come to be known as the "Drake equation," which is considered by many to be one of the most renowned equations in the history of science.

Uh, this might be a tad bit hyperbolic. Does anyone even consider it serious science?

labster• 5 years ago

Of course it’s serious science, it’s just thinking about statistics. Of course most of the values are unknown right now, as we are just starting our survey of exoplanets. But it raises lots of questions, and those are good for science.

paxys2• 5 years ago

I don't see how it meets even a single step of the scientific method. You can call it a somewhat scientific thought experiment, if such a thing even exists, but that's about it.

jandrese• 5 years ago

I always thought it was a bit of a lark. You multiply a whole bunch of unknowns with huge errors bars together to get a totally new unknown with universe sized error bars.

pie4204• 5 years ago

Yep, it's really silly. It's really just saying we don't know, and here's a breakdown of all the reasons that we don't know.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

I think a journalist wanted to convey the concept of "well-known" coupled with a sense of respect. I sense the word choice made sense in a thesaurus.

Dylan16807• 5 years ago

It seems fine to me. Even if you don't think it's "serious" enough for you, it's a scientific way to organize an explanation of the world and it's very famous.

myfavoritedog4• 5 years ago

It’s interesting to see how much work people seem to think that framing the Drake equation as a “thought experiment” does.

If it’s a thought experiment, stop calling it an “equation”. People hear that something is an equation and they think that there’s real math and science involved. Call it the “Drake Conjecture” or something.

8bitsrule• 5 years ago

I think that when it was originated, it was close to being in the same condition the Schroedinger equation was when it was originated. He basically pulled it out of his ... thin air as well. It got attention because of its heuristic value - and 'felt right' (not a factor to be overlooked).

To this day, as WP notes, 'It is typically not possible to solve the Schrödinger equation exactly for situations of physical interest.' Yet he got a Nobel prize for it. Frank used his equation to get us thinking about SETI, and SETI is now decades old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation

thaumasiotes2• 5 years ago

Does anyone even consider it serious science?

Yes, just like there are people who consider Crystal Power serious science. A lot of people are deeply impressed by the Drake Equation, presumably because they can't understand it.

neolog2• 5 years ago

What's unserious about it?

s1artibartfast5• 5 years ago

Sure, why not?

In terms of renown, it is probably it the top equations people would be able to recognize by name, and tell you what it is about. The only equations that might be more recognizable by name are the Pythagorean theorem, ideal gas law, and perhaps some Newtons laws of motion.

In terms of scientific relevance, It is a tool for examining what many people consider the single most important questions ever asked.

pie4204• 5 years ago

It's nowhere close. The quadratic equation, pthagorean theorem. Heros law, and a hundred other more simple equations are more famous.

jcadam• 5 years ago

Personally, I'm starting to lean toward the Rare Earth hypothesis.

I do, however, like the "solution" posited in the short story "The Crystal Spheres": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Spheres

hackeraccount• 5 years ago

Everything I've read makes me think life almost certainly exists outside of the Earth, I'm even open to the idea that it exists within the solar system. Complex eukaryotic type life? I'd be that's a lot more rare - consider that prokaryotes look to have popped almost as soon was possible but then it apparently to several billion years for eukaryotes.

cletus6• 5 years ago

"Equation" is an unfortunate name because some view that like the Drake Equation is meant to produce a quantifiable number. It isn't and never was. It's a thought experiment and a way to frame the problem (the article states this explicitly).

What has changed is the assumptions about how we would detect a starfaring civilization. 60 years ago we were assuming radio communications because that seemed to be where our future was and, by extension, what we might expect other civilizations to do.

Obviously the values in the equation are unknown. We use such things to frame problems that involve unknowns like this. A good example: the anthropic principle [1].

Anyway, the more prevalent line of thinking now is that starfaring civilizations are likely to end up building Dyson swarms. This is a long and complex discussion. There are many objections but those objections tend to suffer from the problem that, if that objection is true, there should be more not less starfaring life (eg any form of FTL).

If matter is the ultimate limiter to civilizations then it makes sense that civilizations will try and amass as much of it as possible. It doesn't matter if not every civilization goes this route because even one such galaxy-spanning civilization within a million light years will stand out (based on the IR signature).

Even without that it probably wouldn't take more than about 10M years for humanity to colonize the Milky Way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

LatteLazy5• 5 years ago

Wait, do people actually think Dyson swarms are a thing? The amount of time and energy needed to build them always seemed ridiculous to me. Especially as all you gain is energy (which hasn’t proven limiting) and you lose almost everything else (gravity and atmosphere for a start)...

mgolawala• 5 years ago

I am not at all well informed about this but I imagined a Dyson swarm would sort of grow and evolve organically over time. Not as an end goal in themselves.

For example, if you start building space habitats (even if they are enclosed cylinders such that they hold an atmosphere and provide gravity via rotation) you need to put them somewhere. It makes sense to throw them in orbit around the star at some optimal distance (for example at 1AU +/- some amount), if you continue to put more and more such habitats around a star in similar orbits over time, in sufficient numbers, wouldn't they start to resemble a Dyson swarm?

the84725• 5 years ago

Especially as all you gain is energy (which hasn’t proven limiting)

What? Civilization runs on cheap, abundant energy. Before the industrial revolution we had to use labor animals, slaves and the occasionally water and wind mill. Providing light was expensive. Global supply chains (transportation), aluminium smelting, fixing nitrogen for fertilizer or calcination for cement consume stupendous amounts of energy.

If energy became cheaper then creating green fuel for airplanes and rockets, electrorefining all metals, desalination or perhaps mining and crushing olivine rocks for carbon sequestration would become more feasible.

Whenever vertical farming is discussed here the main counter-argument boils down to energy not being cheap enough. It's hard to compete with the sun delivering it to plants for free.

cletus6• 5 years ago

Wait, do people actually think Dyson swarms are a thing?

Yes, absolutely. The main reason is that building orbitals is largely an engineering problem. You need a material no stronger than stainless steel. If graphite is feasible, it allows you to build bigger orbitals but it's not necessary.

Compare this to a lot of other proposed megastructures like space elevators, which would take a material to build that doesn't currently exist.

Also, to be clear, we're talking about Dyson _Swarms_. This is the original design idea that was called Dyson Spheres but that name is often not used because people mistakenly think we're talking about a rigid shell that encompasses a star. That is not and never was the intent. It's also impossible for many reasons.

A Dyson swarm is simply a collection of orbitals. The great thing about it is you can also build it incrementally.

Note that since these are spinning orbitals they have (spin) gravity and atmospheres.

Energy is absolutely a factor here.

UI_at_80x242• 5 years ago

I liked that Ringworld addresses this.

What Dyson Sphere's excel at is hiding their location* and capturing 100% of a stars output. At those sizes, a civilization MUST have already conquered the energy problem. It'd be impossible to construct without "free energy", because you need to convert that energy into matter to make/engineer enough material to create a sphere the size of the Goldilocks zone.

And as you said, you'd lose atmosphere & gravity* would be wonky.

But to address the fine article, the equation was a thought experiment. We now have hard data on the number of stars that we've looked at that have planets. And of those we have a hard number that have planets in the habitable zone. The Drake Equation presumes that you guess TINY numbers for those values. Well using known numbers and extrapolating the number of possible worlds with intelligent life jumps from staggering large, to incomprehensible.

As humans, we can barely communicate with others of our own species. Let's frame the problem another way.

Put two Americans in a room. One is deaf, the other is blind. How long does it take for them to agree on what to eat for dinner?

Context depends on language. We may have been bombarded by intelligent alien life for centuries; we just don't know that somebody is talking.

*Everybody forgets about gravity.

the84725• 5 years ago

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox[0] is a great and easy to read paper to disabuse anyone of the idea of multiplying point estimates when you could convolve probability distributions instead.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

floxy• 5 years ago

I think this paper should be a top level HN discussion thread.

robocat2• 5 years ago

I was confused by the line in the original article “by multiplying uncertain variables, the level of uncertainty grows exponentially, to the point where no firm conclusions are possible.”

Because when I looked for an explanation, it wasn’t exponential: https://foothill.edu/psme/daley/tutorials_files/10.%20Error%...

analog312• 5 years ago

>> 60 years ago we were assuming radio communications because that seemed to be where our future was and, by extension, what we might expect other civilizations to do.

Indeed, and today, the bulk of our communications are via enclosed waveguides -- fiber optics. And our remaining wireless communications are quickly evolving towards both decreasing power use and signal formats that are nearly indistinguishable from noise. Our period of "hot" radio emissions may only span roughly a century.

gus_massa• 5 years ago

Once we go interplanetary, we will need to turn on the radio again.

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

Geometric growth would put it at far less than 10M years? On the order of hundreds of thousands I would think.

cletus6• 5 years ago

The Milky Way is estimated to be ~100,000 light years across. We're not quite on the edge but we're closer to the edge than the center. So to colonize the galaxy you have to assume we'd need to travel almost 100,000 LY. If you assume moving at 1% of the speed of light, you come up with a lower bound of 10M years.

jfengel• 5 years ago

The Drake equation is an example of a more general issue in science: what are we going to spend money on?

The Drake equation is treated as fodder for late-night Cheetos-driven college sophomore discussions. But we use it, and siblings, to estimate the inestimable: how much value do we get out of a dollar put towards actually investigating this?

No matter what the field, it's always all over the map. Do we want to spend gigabucks on an LHC successor in the hopes of a vast payoff? Do we want to spend megabucks on this specific line of cancer research? Or should we spend the same money on thousands of kilobuck experiments in everything from economics to psychology to polymer chemistry?

It's even harder when there isn't actually a dollar value attached. Even if we discover alien life, what's the merit of that? Economically, perhaps nothing, other than sales of "I wanted to believe/and I was right" tee shirts. But in terms of satisfaction, perhaps more than all of the movies and video games ever made put together.

That's why we spend so much effort trying to estimate priors that we know are too wild to be of actual value in that calculation. Playing with the Drake equation is fun. That's all. But it does also ultimately inform the expenditure of some resources, even if we don't actually do the math.

s1artibartfast5• 5 years ago

Why do anything?

Any questions of resource allocation ultimately come down to a question individual and social values, or merit, as you phrased it.

Merit is inherently arbitrary. Some people can and do think answering the question of the existence of extraterrestrial life has intrinsic merit and is the single most important society could do. More important than improving global prosperity or even continuation of the species.

myfavoritedog4• 5 years ago

It seems odd to be conducting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for radio signals from distant planets.

Maybe we should figure out what all these UFOs are here first.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/17/ufo-sightin...

jodrellblank3• 5 years ago

I can't read that past the paywall, but what's your answer to https://xkcd.com/1235/ ?

myfavoritedog4• 5 years ago

I love the relevance of an XKCD as much as the next guy, but a clever graph doesn’t compare to the admissions of the military and US government that these videos are not faked. They can’t explain these craft that seem to be propelled in ways that are entirely unfamiliar to airforce personnel who are themselves familiar with cutting edge earthling aircraft.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-military-intelligence-60-mi...

[edited for grammar]

TheOtherHobbes• 5 years ago

There's a missing term: "How much of our potential budget are we spending trying to fill in the other estimates?"

SETI is incredibly poorly funded compared to other science. For a long time it was barely funded at all. There's been an uptick recently, but a project like Breakthrough Listen runs on $10m/yr and gets ridiculously constrained access to telescope time.

The remaining SETI projects get by on less than $5m/yr. So SETI as a whole gets about as much funding as one episode of The Mandalorian.

No wonder we haven't found anything. We're barely even looking.

denton-scratch4• 5 years ago

Why would we allocate ginormous budgets to a project like SETI?

Suppose we detected a radio signal from a location outside the solar system, that seemed to bespeak intelligence. That means it must be at least 1.5 LY away. But we haven't yet detected an exoplanet around Alpha Centauri, let alone one with goldilocks properties.

But for the sake of argument, let's suppose that we detect a radio signal from Alpha Centauri, and a matching exoplanet.

I suppose that would make it reasonable to conclude that (a) we have neighbours, and (b) that they're probably common. But we have only highly-speculative and fantastically expensive ideas about how we might get a human to Alpha Centauri. It would, for example, require a Generation spaceship.

I suppose we could imagine exchanging scientific knowledge with the beings of Alpha Centauri, over a radio link - with a ping time of 3 years. And the bandwidth isn't going to be that impressive, either.

I totally believe that there is other intelligent life in the Universe; but I simply don't believe that, if they are really intelligent, they would burn their resources on a project that might not be complete before they become extinct. I doubt they're anything like as close as Alpha Centauri, and therefore I doubt that we'll ever encounter them physically. From that point of view, it doesn't make much difference to anything whether they exist or not.

marze• 5 years ago

I think next year would be a better time to update the equation.

mFixman• 5 years ago

What I never understood about the Drake equation and the search for intelligent alien life is why people assume that "intelligence" is something special and not something inherently human. There's no reason to see human-like intelligence as one of the infinite amount of properties a life form can have.

"Two possibilities exist: we are either the only things in the Universe that regularly speak Swedish or we are not. Both are equally terrifying".

lovemenot• 5 years ago

Yes, I have been saying something like this for years. I believe this is the first time I have seen someone else make the same point here.

My dog is looking for signs of extraterrestrial super-olfaction.

c-smile• 5 years ago

Are we still looking for other forms of life on this very planet?

Are we sure now that DNA-based life and only of those four bases is the only form of life that was born here?

If "yes" then it means that it is highly probable that other forms of life are also DNA based, no?

xutopia• 5 years ago

Even with speed of light the farthest message we could have sent would barely peak out of our cosmic neighborhood. We need a powered probe that accelerates outwards sending a message for any chance of being heard out there in any reasonable time.

behringer3• 5 years ago

The speed limit of the universe is light speed. If you were to send a powered probe into the universe at almost the speed of light, and then send a light speed signal out on top of that, it would still be sent at the speed of light.

Eg, no signal sent from any probe will ever get as far as our first radio signals sent into the universe, unless we find a faster than light solution.

This is what Einstein discovered for us, which is called the theory of relativity.

kortex• 5 years ago

I read it to mean "probe that is moving hella fast and also radiating in every direction." So there is a "contact cone" rather than a "contact sphere," increasing the amount of space interacted with (even if only briefly)

lamontcg• 5 years ago

Nope. It seems to be working just fine to spur discussion and though. The replacement seems much less useful.

The fact that some of the factors may be close to 1.0 or may be unknowable directly is not a bug.

denton-scratch4• 5 years ago

"by multiplying uncertain variables, the level of uncertainty grows exponentially"

No it doesn't. It grows geometrically.

"the number of confirmed exoplanets has grown exponentially"

That implies that the rate of discovery of exoplanets is proportional to the number already discovered. I've no reason to think that's the case; and it seems really improbable.

When a science journalist uses the word "exponential" to mean "very fast", I conclude that I'm reading some kind of low-grade popsci from a lazy writer who thinks fancy words make them look clever. Well, it might to some people; to me, it just makes them look ignorant.

denton-scratch4• 5 years ago

"But considering that the payoff will be the single greatest discovery in the history of humanity"

Oh, my goodness. Hyperbole much?

Detecting signs of life is all very well; but most (all?) such signals will have come from so far away that either we'll have evolved, or they'll have evolved. The chances that we'll ever meet such beings is minute.

I would expect the greatest discovery ever to actually make practical difference to something.

The tiny bandwidth and enormous turnaround time for any electromagnetic signal over (say) 20LY will stymie any attempt to transfer useful amounts of information. Probes are more promising; but note that Voyager 1 has travelled just over 1/1,000 of a light-year so far. To travel 20LY, it would need to survive in deep space for 40,000 years. Humans have never built a machine that could survive in working order for more than about 200 years.

For such a probe to tell us anything interesting, we'd be faced again with the bandwidth problem; or the probe would have to come back. By the time we got information back, it would be 40,000 years in the future. We know barely anything about human culture 40,000 years ago; if we had launched an interstellar probe 40,000 years ago, we'd have zero cultural memory of that fact by now.

So this "greatest discovery" is most likely to fall into the "gosh, that's quite interesting" category, rather than the "most important ever" category.

w0de0• 5 years ago

What’s the bandwidth problem? Could we modulate the light coming from our star just so?

denton-scratch4• 5 years ago

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6207/what-bitrates...

The greater the distance, the more the signal is attenuated, so the harder it becomes to distinguish signal from background-noise, so the slower you have to send.

'Modulate the light from our star':

Not sure how one might set about that. As things stand, we need extremely sensitive instruments to detect the starlight-modulation caused by orbiting exoplanets. A planetary-scale modulator would give you a bandwidth in the order of one bit per orbit.

Supposing we could construct a device that could modulate sunlight, it would need to be big - orders of magnitude bigger than anything humans have ever made. Our interstallar probe would have to deploy such a device on arrival, in order to 'call home'.

I suppose it's conceivable, as an idea; but the cost of such a project would be unimaginable, and the benefit would be useless information: e.g. "There is life on this planet; but you have no chance of getting here, and they have no chance of getting to you". That's not actionable information.

And you'll be getting the signal 20,000 years after launching the probe; that's the span of all of human civilisation. There's every chance that humans 20,000 years in the future would not be very interested in a signal from a probe launched by their 'primitive' ancestors. That's if they had any cultural memory from their ancestors that there ever was such a probe; but how much do we know about the culture of humans 20,000 years ago? If they had launched a probe, we would have to learn that from fossilised bones, which seems far-fetched.

juancn• 5 years ago

I think the chance of detecting another civilization right now is rather slim. Maybe in a couple thousand years.

I'll try to explain my reasoning. First, a few assumptions:

- Life and intelligence are physical processes. Given the starting conditions of the universe, they'll eventually pop up somewhere.

- Where it pops up, is random and relatively uniformly distributed in space (as for the density, I don't know)

- Humans are an average civilization

- For most civilizations it takes about the same time than us from the start of the universe to reach our current level of advancement (given that we presume that we're average).

Under these assumptions, we have been detectable for roughly the last 100 years. So we can assume, that it's about the same for an average civilization out there.

Even if they're plentiful, it's unlikely that the signals from the close ones would have reached us yet. So everything looks dark.

It wouldn't surprise me if in a few thousand years, the sky starts lighting up with signals from other worlds, as the signals from the ones that are reaching detectability start getting to us.

60 years later, is it time to update the Drake equation?

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