Drake on Drake: ET Life A Certainty

Posted by timothy on Monday July 15, 2002 @05:12PM from the evaluating-evidence dept.

astro writes "Frank Drake, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute applies Occam's Razor to his own Drake equation: 'Life should appear very frequently on other Earth-like planets. There will be microbial life nearby the solar system.' The simplest scenario is that 'Not Life' has a nearly identical number of assumptions as 'Life.' The contrasting view is that experimentation can prove it--but how many times did life independently create itself while the Earth changed through the whole spectrum of what biological forces might conjure up elsewhere. A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history."

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Re:well. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-15 20:00 · Score: 4, Funny

Leo Szilard is rumoured to have answered Fermi about this paradox: ``Maybe they're already here, and you just call them Hungarians.''

For you youngsters, Leo was talking about the brightest man ever, i.e. John von Neumann.