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Drake on Drake: ET Life A Certainty

Posted by timothy on 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."

4 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. 1 != Many by $carab · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history
    Ummm....Im sorry, but I thought that there was, perhaps many singular events where life was formed billions of years ago, but simple evolution and extinction dont "scale" to be equivalent to non-life becoming life.

    Furthermore, I recall reading a book..."Probability 1", that spend several chapters mucking around before submitting a "proof" that there must be intelligent life elsewhere...As I recall, it hinged on one instance of life, which is us.

  2. Ockham vs. Drake, the remix by nachoworld · · Score: 4, Interesting

    William of Ockham - "One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."

    Francis Drake - "My whole life's work, from SETI to the Drake equation to the 1970's Arecibo radio transmission, depends on their being aliens somewhere in the Universe, so I'll pop up every year or so and assert that ET does exist so I won't be a failure.

    --

    ---
    I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
  3. Re:well. by sconeu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Congratulations! You've just described Fermi's Paradox.

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  4. the real question is by g4dget · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why would intelligent life want to talk to earth? Indeed, why would it want to talk to anyone? If there is other intelligent life out there that managed to survive more than a few thousand years, maybe they just figured out that staying home taking care of their own planet is a lot more pleasant than traveling around the universe in tin cans or holding conversations with hundreds of years of lag.