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The Drake Equation: Revisiting a Classic Tool to Estimate the Odds of Contact
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Richard M Lawn Send message Joined: 23 Feb 19 Posts: 9 Credit: 0 RAC: 0 |
This month we revisit the Drake Equation. Nearly everyone interested in SETI has heard of it, but views of its utility vary widely. To some, it is a useful way to estimate the number of technological civilizations in our galaxy and the chances of detecting an extraterrestrial message. Others view it as a wasted effort, given the huge range of conjectures involved in its components. There is a middle ground to use it to update and assess the reliability of relevant data that we have and the ways to improve upon the uncertainties. It can certainly be an effective tool for stimulating curiosity on this subject. Frank Drake presented the Equation in 1961 at what may have been the first formal SETI conference with the intent to stimulate discussion and evaluate proposed research, not to arrive at a true estimate of the number of intelligent ETs whose signals we could detect by multiplying its components. In its original form, the Drake Equation is: N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L where:
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Tom M Send message Joined: 28 Nov 02 Posts: 5126 Credit: 276,046,078 RAC: 462 |
If N = 100,000 it means that we should search more than 3 million stars at multiple wave lengths to have a solid chance of making contact. Does anyone know how close Seti@Home is to having searched 3 million stars? Tom A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association). |
iwazaru Send message Joined: 31 Oct 99 Posts: 173 Credit: 509,430 RAC: 0 |
That's a great question. I'd love to know the answer to this too. ( I did some back of the envelope math that is very likely wrong but... to the best of my abilities after spending no more than 5 minutes on this and I came up with a number as low as 100,000 stars. But again, my abilities aren't great so that may as well be a guess. Edit: In fact you may treat this as my "guess how many jellybeans are in the jar" answer. I could easily be exponentially wrong as cubed light years are involved in the equation...) |
xe1ici Send message Joined: 9 Jan 19 Posts: 7 Credit: 16,535 RAC: 0 |
Interesante articulo Richard, lo ultimo que haces referencia es indudablemente cierto ¿ que tanto creemos o no sobre los ET ? |
Tom M Send message Joined: 28 Nov 02 Posts: 5126 Credit: 276,046,078 RAC: 462 |
Interesante articulo Richard, lo ultimo que haces referencia es indudablemente cierto ¿ que tanto creemos o no sobre los ET ? Interesting article Richard, the last thing you are referring to is undoubtedly true, how much do we believe or not about ET? |
adrianxw Send message Joined: 14 Jul 99 Posts: 173 Credit: 1,698,756 RAC: 3 |
I think a valid extension of the Drake equation would be a second time factor. An advanced, communicative civilization could evolve, develop and die out before the sun condensed. Adding one you could say it showed how many communicative intelligences exist today. Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream. |
arcanewizard Send message Joined: 17 Jan 19 Posts: 5 Credit: 437,503 RAC: 0 |
you got it !! |
pestw Send message Joined: 7 Aug 08 Posts: 1 Credit: 529,356 RAC: 0 |
Dolphins are certainly intelligent, but they are unlikely to build powerful radio transmitters and point them skyward. This is an essential point, in my opinion. We humans tend to assume that our life form be the self-evident summit of evolution. We shouldn't forget, however, that the dinosaurs existed for several hundred million years and if there hadn't been this big asteroid bouncing down, they might still continue to prevail our planet without ever emitting radio waves. Despite they were highly evolved creatures, they couldn't have been detected by our techniques. Life restarted almost at zero after this mass extinction event and brought new forms of life into existence and coincidentially, the fittest of them is emitting radio waves for about 100 years now. After the next mass extinction, which might be immediately impending, another well-developed life form my prevail, perhaps even a technical one, which however does not use to use electromagnetic waves for communication but is based completely on glass fibres. Yes, highly developed, but not detectable from lightyears away. Nonetheless, I think we shouldn't miss the - unlikely - event that signals from a civilisation similar to ours might hit our antennae if this should occur anyway. That's why I support SETI@home. |
M. L. anderson Send message Joined: 28 Mar 08 Posts: 4 Credit: 20,945 RAC: 0 |
The concept and the ideas of intelligent beings being found in the galaxy is next to zero. The reason why is that we had intelligent beings here on earth other than human beings, a couple of swim in the ocean, the Whales and the Dauphins. Some live on the land, the elephant and the great apes. The only one of those animals mentioned above that have been actually communicated with is the great ape through sign language, that we taught her. Another factor that would affect the Drake formula, and that is the social life of the intelligent being. If he is warlike, and develops technologies as we did, only 40 years after learning how to fly, he may have destroyed himself in a nuclear war, or poisoned his planet with poison gases, during a war. I base my assumptions on my studies of biology, on history of our own world, and on reading science fiction by great writers, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Ben Bova. I grew up on a farm and watch the behavior of animals both wild and tame, the honey bee has its own language, we have figured out what it's little dance stands for. The aunt also has a language, it drops chemicals and pheromones to tell the other ants in the colony, what is going on. They hardly even have a brain, yet they have a language. So think about it, all animals have their own language, but we have only been able to communicate with one great ape, because we taught it our sign language. Maybe it was more intelligent than we are, we still don't know it's language. M L A |
adrianxw Send message Joined: 14 Jul 99 Posts: 173 Credit: 1,698,756 RAC: 3 |
It would not be possible to communicate with an ape in terms of speech as their vocal biology differs from ours. Sign language is communication. Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream. |
jjbb Send message Joined: 4 Apr 19 Posts: 1 Credit: 445,516 RAC: 2 |
Soy novato en todo seti@home, me encanta haber encontrado un sitio donde se hable sobre estos asuntos y donde mi computador sirva para descubrir una Inteligencia extraterrestre. Especialmente, Mis más sincero agradecimiento a el autor de "The Drake Equation: Revisiting a Classic Tool to Estimate the Odds of Contact", puesto que repasa,con seguridad conceptos que te abren los ojos. Se me ocurre que, , entrando de lleno en el terreno de S&F, que a mi modo de ver es magnifica, hablando sobre la trilogÃa de Cixin Liu, EL recuerdo del pasado de la tierra galardonada en el año 2015 con el premio HUGO, en ella se manifiestan algunos de estos conceptos y donde se especulan cuestiones fillosoficas sobre lo que ocurre al emitir ondas de radio al espacio. lo recomiendo encarecidamente. Ante todo quiero pedir disculpas por expresarme en español, más o menos leo el idioma inglés, lo hago asÃ, porque mis expresiones son mas ricas, Podéis traducirme. |
Mikenstein Send message Joined: 6 Sep 15 Posts: 8 Credit: 10,747,261 RAC: 0 |
While I will always donate my spare computer time to SETI@home. Recently I began to wonder, considering the vastness of space. When we receive an "intelligent signal" and try to respond, will anyone at the source remember that a signal was sent? Or even be alive? Consider the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system. IF it is ever found by another race, will anyone be here? if so will anyone remember what the voyagers were meant to do? Perhaps I'm off the subject somewhat but that is what my first thoughts were after reading the first part of the post. |
Mikenstein Send message Joined: 6 Sep 15 Posts: 8 Credit: 10,747,261 RAC: 0 |
Just to play God's advocate for a moment. Since in the major branches of monotheism God Gave us free will. What makes anyone think he or she would have put all of his or her faith in one race of beings? That's like pputting all of the eggs in one basket! Those who fail to remember the past are DOOMED to repeat it! |
ejthedj Send message Joined: 20 May 99 Posts: 46 Credit: 3,574,999 RAC: 2 |
Dolphins are certainly intelligent, but they are unlikely to build powerful radio transmitters and point them skyward. There are low odds for anything if you want them to be. But the Drake Equation, given very, very conservative numbers, is telling us that there are HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of intelligent creatures in the universe. True, they may not all speak English and look just like us and have exactly 2 ears (maybe they are just dolphins or birds or fish), but I would argue that out of the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of civilizations, there have to be say 1% that we can detect if given enough time. 1% of 200million is 2 million civilizations we should be able to detect. But the universe is immensely vast. Even if we should only be able to detect 1000 civilizations, we have to look in just the right place and at the right time. If there is another civilization 50 light years away and pumping signals into space and we detect them, it's going to take us (at best) 50 years to send a message back to them and pray they hear the signal and reply. Just like your local radio station, once the radio wave passes you, that's it. You can't go back 10 minutes and listen to the song again. If that civilization 50 or 1000 light years away spits out a signal and it passes Earth, it's gone and we never would have known. The Drake Equation does not give us a number we CAN DETECT...it gives us a number of intelligent civilizations that should be out there. I often think about the fact that us humans have only been around for 100,000 years and have only been pumping radio waves into the universe for 100+ years, had electricity for 100+ years, and developed equipment to detect (hopefully) other civilizations for 50+ years. For the sake of speed and typing, I am going to refer to any intelligent civilization in the universe that is similar to us at the year 2019 as Others...What if there were Others on Mars (or name your planet in our galaxy) 50,000 years ago but got wiped out by an asteroid? What if there are Others somewhere out there that we could detect with our equipment, but, right now, they are living in the year 1800 or 1902?...we would miss them. What if the Others are currently in the year 2389 and no longer use radio waves or similar technology we can detect? And of course, what if they are purposely being silent and/or blocking our detection techniques? There are countless examples of why we are and/or may be missing the Others. Not to mention we've been searching for less than 50 years, our equipment becomes better and more sensitive every 10 years, and we have searched a minuscule portion of the universe. |
Tom M Send message Joined: 28 Nov 02 Posts: 5126 Credit: 276,046,078 RAC: 462 |
Why? Part of religion is "faith in the unseen/unknowable". Faith doesn't change for many people, even if facts do. I agree there might be consequences to discovering scientific proof of ETI. I am hopeful that the refusal to believe scientists/media will be enough to protect the majority of humans from immediate panic. After a while, we can have a "low boil" panic :( Tom A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association). |
Regans PC Send message Joined: 22 Nov 99 Posts: 2 Credit: 2,398,239 RAC: 17 |
"You are entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts." Patrick Moynihan …………………… Facts can never be claimed by one. One's own facts should be universal, if they are just that - "facts"! |
mark stadden Send message Joined: 12 Nov 16 Posts: 2 Credit: 227,714 RAC: 0 |
our solar system is approx. 4 billion years old how they date this is still a mystery to me as they cannot date rocks on earth yet they can on the moon which has seen solar flares for millions of years also how the moon was formed does not make sence to me because it was created a hell of a lot closer to slow the earth down from a 6 hour day to a 24 hour day yet the mass of the moon didn't fall back to earth via gravity also the back of the moon is thicker than the side we see you would think that the thicker side due to mass would be drawn to face the earth.. I think that the universe is even older because all we can see is what the hubble deep field shows us yet it cannot show us the infra red spectrum..so all this means is that the universe is even older than people think and they are to stupid and proud to admit that they are wrong if einstien can admit it why can't modern day scientists do the same |
Jim Franklin Send message Joined: 3 Apr 99 Posts: 108 Credit: 10,843,395 RAC: 39 |
The Drake equation has been around since 1960, and since then many of the unknowns are now better understood, but that does not make the final answer any more real than one from back in the early days. Whilst we know more, we are finding we also know less in many ways, especially on the topic of the emergence and life and where life may actually arise. For example, the Drake equation does not take into account Exo-moons, the fact that a planet the size of Earth could easily be a satellite of a Gas giant world, and for all we know, planet sized moons could be as common as major planets, look at our own solar system, Io, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, Titan and Triton would all be classed as planets if they simply orbited the Sun, and there is an outside chance that life could exist in sub-surface oceans on several of these bodies. Then we get to another issue, which recently I have been trying to factor into the Drake equation, the age of the galaxy, the rate of star deaths and the size of the galaxy. Playing with some figures based on the Kepler results and trying various parameters, we could have 1 (Humanity) or 10,600 technically advanced societies alive at this moment in time, but when you then take into account the size of the Galaxy, it's volume, you end up with one such society in a space of around 340 light years across, That is a staggering piece of real estate and encompasses some 320,000 stellar systems - and that is the best case scenario. Now it is possible that several of these societies could reside in a space area of space and not be evenly spread out, but even so, we are looking at distances of perhaps hundreds of light years between societies. I find this rather disappointing, I personally believe that the galaxy, and thus the universe, is teaming with life, and that where environmental conditions allow for complex chemical reactions to occur over hundreds of millions of years, nature will find a way and life will evolve - I suspect that only a very small percentage of life bearing worlds will through up technically advanced societies capable of investigating the Universe and thus potential communication, but even so, I know in my heart they are out there, and that the Drake equation, whilst not pointless, is unhelpful until we are able to pin down more of it's parameters with better data and we have more examples of life, in any form, to better understand it's evolution. I personally advocate better investigations into Venus, Mars and the major moons of the solar system - we may find nothing, but we may just find the holly grail too.. |
Nigel Garvey Send message Joined: 18 May 99 Posts: 39 Credit: 2,228,452 RAC: 3 |
Richard M Lawn wrote: In the otherwise wonderful science fiction movie Arrival, I was puzzled that it was left up to Amy Adams to figure out the language of the visiting cloud creatures, rather than the other way around. Well that was the whole point of the film, wasn't it? Both sides learned the others' written language because they weren't physically capable of reproducing each others' sounds. The heptapods' language turned out to be their gift to us in exchange for a favour they'd need a few thousand years in the future. Learning it changed Amy Adams's character's perception of time and enabled her to save the immediate situation. It's a sci-fi conceit based on language theory, not a technical error in a documentary about how aliens would communicate from the other side of the galaxy. NG |
Mr. Kevvy Send message Joined: 15 May 99 Posts: 3806 Credit: 1,114,826,392 RAC: 3,319 |
But the Drake Equation, given very, very conservative numbers, is telling us that there are HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of intelligent creatures in the universe. This seemingly large number is less than one intelligent species per thousand galaxies, there being over a hundred billion of those. My pessimistic numbers resulted in one or two civilizations per galaxy. I think that intelligent life is exceedingly rare; plenty of bacteria out there, and very few civilizations. But given that they are likely to be far older than ours, I still think it's worthwhile to look for them. A very small chance is always larger than zero. :^) |
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