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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I agree - it's basically just a way to arrive at a meaningless number by multiplying a whole lot of wild-ass guesses together.

Do we have anything better, though?

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Yeah, that's probably the point. You have to start somewhere.

Personally I'm blown away that some parameters, like the fraction of those stars that have planets, we are able to capably plug values in for.

I really never thought we'd be able to get statistics for things like that in my lifetime.

I mean short of faster-than-light travel, I had assumed ignorantly that astronomy would be stuck more or less where it is for centuries to come.

I wrote a presentation for undergrad on the equation; and that was the focus. I went through each value and talked about the bounds for each value and arguments for those bounds. We’re still incredibly ignorant, but the bounds on the values have improved a lot. At the time the equation was written, it was assumed other stars had planets, but it wasn’t known and the value could have been anything. Now we know the f_p ≈ 1.

Amazing isn't it? I really appreciated 'archives of the universe', which describes the chronological advancement of astronomy since the ancient Greek. Often by simply annotating the original works or papers. Amazing to see how humanity has gained insight piece by piece, thanks to the hard work of a select group op people.

https://cmsw.mit.edu/archives-of-the-universe-marcia-bartusi...

I see it as a way of focusing the discussion. The numbers we could plug into it are mostly all wild guesses, but the exercise of plugging in different numbers can still be instructive.

For example, we now know there are a huge number of planets out there, and even planets in the habitable zone. Yet we haven't found any extraterrestrial life, so that suggests maybe the other factors are smaller than we initially would have guessed.

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