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Comment by keithwarren | Hacker News Reader

Michael Crichton tears up the Drake Equation (and SETI) pretty thoroughly in his speech entitled Aliens Cause Global Warming.

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers...

"...the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested..."

-Crichton

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While it may be apocryphal, it's said that Drake described the equation as a means of "organizing our ignorance". That is, it's not meant to be applied literally, but rather as a means of focusing discussion on the relevant parameters. In that sense, I think it's been phenomenally successful.

Exactly. First step in knowing something like that is putting into words what we don't know. And it's not insurmountable; the data from the Kepler spacecraft is giving us quite a bit of data that may go a long way to building a statistical model for one of the unknown variables.

The fact that the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero is precisely the point. There is a "right" answer and we can get closer and closer to it if we choose what to study properly.

We know a lot more about exoplanets now than we did in 2003. We're moving on to find out how many are in the Goldilocks zone, or how many contain water. Our idea of what to plug in is slowly getting better.

Pointing out that the Drake equation is technically not science since it doesn't involve testable hypotheses is pointless pedantry. Call it statistics then. Or metaphysics. Or a thought experiment.

I think you're right. It's even pretty self-evident that it isn't zero: First, if any of the factors in the equation were zero, then I wouldn't be typing this. Second, imagine if you rolled a die with an unknown number of sides a thousand times and only got to look at one result, which turned out to be a 2. Would you argue that it was totally plausible for the other 999 rolls to have produced 1's? Possible, yes, but not bloody likely, and all you need to do is look at the night sky to see there's some serious dice rolling going on.

"We know a lot more about exoplanets now than we did in 2003. We're moving on to find out how many are in the Goldilocks zone, or how many contain water. Our idea of what to plug in is slowly getting better."

"Unfortunately", that's nailing down the one parameter that nobody has ever particularly questioned. There's some lines of thought that our solar system might be unusual in relevant ways, but nobody has ever seriously argued that the only planets in the galaxy are in our system, or anything related to that that would make that parameter small.

It's all the rest of the parameters where the mystery is.

If anyone is wondering about the weird title of that speech, Crichton is a global warming denier.

Was. He died in 2008.

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