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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

Can someone shed light the significance of his extra terrestrial life equation:

N = R × N(Earth) × F(Life) × F(Intelligence) × F(Communication) × L

The individual components are quite straightforward. What I don't get is that it seems like breaking one problem down into several more unknown problems none of which really help. In fact, it seems a harder to know the individual frequencies than it would be to actually find any single ET life. Even if we found life, we still wouldn't have a much of a clue of the frequencies (unless, I suppose, the ET life had mapped or sampled the universe and shared that knowledge with us or gave us FTL tech -- one can dream!).

Other discussions have focused around approximation of the # of habitable planets, which makes total sense.

I guess my question is what knowledge or insight would enable us to estimate the frequency of life occurring?

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The Drake Equation is a thought experiment and a toy model that, on occasion, people mistake for having deep and empirical meaning.

My take on the Drake equation is that it gives you a way to play with numbers and break down your guesses in a rational way. The article suggests an estimate of N(Earth) so this is one step in the direction of not entirely ruling out an N<1.

How else would you estimate N?

It just seems circular to say N can be estimated by looking at the frequency of life occurring. If we knew the frequency of life occurring we'd have a lot more information than what N would tell us, wouldn't we?

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I see the problem as akin to someone giving me an uncountably large number of boxes with each having a some chance between zero or more of them containing a treasure of immeasurable value. The value of the treasure approaches infinity, so even a near 0 chance of its existence means that it has a positive ROI. In that vein, it doesn't really matter what the odds are of finding life, it is a justifiable expenditure that will statistically pay for itself.

Unless the formula can take down to actually zero the odds of their being discoverable life it doesn't change the calculation. That is, whether the odds are 1e-1000% or 99% we should expend basically the same amount of resources to find it.

You might be able to estimate those frequencies without actually counting them on other planets. For instance, by measuring the time between when Earth became habitable and when life started. Or by comparing the number of Earth's species that never became intelligent to those that did.

It could also tell us what the consequences will be of actually making big discoveries like managing to recreate life from scratch in the lab, find it on Mars, or find life on earth opposite chirality indicating independent orign. If we do (or can't!) find those things, how much will that help us predict that we find other civilizations in the galaxy?

I don't think the infinite value argument really works. Finding aliens isn't worth sacrificing everything else for if it's extremely unlikely to succeed. We could just carry on without knowing.

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