Drake on Drake: ET Life A Certainty

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."