New "Drake Equation" Selects Between Alien Worlds

An anonymous reader writes 'A mathematical equation that counts habitats suitable for alien life could complement the Drake equation, which estimates the probability of finding intelligent alien beings elsewhere in the galaxy. That equation, developed in 1960 by US astronomer Frank Drake, estimates the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in our galaxy by considering the number of stars with planets that could support life. The new equation, under development by planetary scientists at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, aims to develop a single index for habitability based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon, and whether or not there are benign environmental conditions.'

Comments

way to go Slashdot

[koxkoxkox]

"under developed" ?

In this case, maybe they should continue working on it before we talk about it, don't you think ?

Seems silly

[ruiner13]

based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon and whether or no there are benign environmental conditions

Aren't there extremophiles on Earth that already lack some if not all of these attributes? Really, the presence of energy seems like the only real requirement for life here on Earth. Who knows what other extremes may lurk extra terrestrially.

Re:Seems silly

[Geoffrey.landis]

based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon and whether or no there are benign environmental conditions

Aren't there extremophiles on Earth that already lack some if not all of these attributes?

No.

No life without water and raw materials. And, as for "benign environmental conditions," that's a little under-defined, but in general, the entire Earth should be called "benign" by the standards of the rest of the solar system.

Re:Seems silly

[elrous0]

It would be more accurate to say "No life, as we know it, without water and raw materials."

Re:Seems silly

[RiotingPacifist]

A solvent (such as water) is needed as chemical reactions are too slow in the gas/solid phase. In addition water has a rare (if not unique) property in that it is the most dense at a point in its liquid phase, this means that at the bottom of a pool of water the temperature can remain pretty constant allowing living things to stay that way until they are capable of surviving at different temperatures.
A raw material (like carbon) is needed to build the backbone of life, it has to have many properties similar to carbon. While other setups are possible the chemistry prefers carbon (its a single chemical as compared to combos and it is very reactive) and the physics does too (there is more of it than the alternatives because its a light element).

Re:Seems silly

[Geoffrey.landis]

Well, true enough; we don't know what life as we don't know it would require.

The question I was replying to was one that began "aren't there extremophiles on Earth that...", but I should have made my reply more explicit, so if my reply was quoted without the original question, it would still be clear.

Re:Seems silly

[drinkypoo]

No life without water and raw materials.

Uh, what? How do you know? No life as we know it. Life as we don't know it still might form an industrial civilization and make radios &c.

And, as for "benign environmental conditions," that's a little under-defined, but in general, the entire Earth should be called "benign" by the standards of the rest of the solar system.

Usually it means "within the range of temperatures and pressures we believe to be capable of supporting life" which is a useful but not inviolate metric.

oblig XKCD

[Arlet]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_drake_equation.png

Re:oblig XKCD

[sakdoctor]

Would it be possible to use collaborative filtering, and meta data provided by xkcd to produce a "These xkcd strips may be obligatory for this article",
for sites such as slashdot?

Re:oblig XKCD

[natehoy]

Might be fun for one person to write the code, but it would destroy the ongoing joy of dozens of slashdotters who have indexed xkcd in their heads and can instantly recall the appropriate xkcd reference.

Some things are best left to trained artisans and handcrafters, and this is one of them. Xkcd references should be lovingly chosen from the available stock, and carefully hand-posted using only the best hand-cut-and-pasted letters in the URL. You just won't get that kind of artistry from an emotionless metadata comparison engine.

Re:oblig XKCD

[Thanshin]

Would it be possible to use collaborative filtering, and meta data provided by xkcd to produce a "These xkcd strips may be obligatory for this article",
for sites such as slashdot?

It's an editing problem.

The editor shouldn't have accepted the submission without the obligatory xkcd link.

"as we know it" clause

[Thanshin]

Hopefully they've detailed somewhere that they're only taking into account the habitability by known possible life forms.

There's no way of knowing whether there's an intelligent life form we've not detected yet, in this very planet. For as much as we know, Earth itself could be a "cell" of a galactic sized life form that has stars as neurons and light as nervous signals.

Re:"as we know it" clause

[wwfarch]

But if the Earth is a "cell" then Smith was right.. we ARE a virus.

Re:"as we know it" clause

[Thanshin]

Right, except for that whole "speed of light" thing, puts a real damper on signal propagation between these stellar neurons.

Given the estimated age of the universe, such a nervous system could have gone through *maybe* the equivalent of a month of thought in a biological brain, which isn't much.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to rule out hypotheses like this.

I'd be surprised indeed.

Will you do it?

Elsewhere in the galaxy

[mcgrew]

A mathematical equation that counts habitats suitable for alien life could complement the Drake equation, which estimates the probability of finding intelligent alien beings elsewhere in the galaxy

Lets see, Peru is in a different part of the galaxy than the US, even though by galactic standards it's REAL close. I talked to an intelligent alien* on the phone yesterday -- he was looking for his ex-wife, who's been living with me lately.

Of course, he's not a space alien, he's a human. The space aliens are in the ISS. They're human too.

*Well, he wasn't very intelligent on the night chronicled in the linked journal, but anger never made anybody very smart.

Re:Elsewhere in the galaxy

[Thanshin]

I talked to an intelligent alien* on the phone yesterday -- he was looking for his ex-wife, who's been living with me lately.

I'm interested in your services and would like to know more. Please elaborate:

- How long was the ex-wife's stay?
- How much do you charge per ex-wife?

Re:Elsewhere in the galaxy

[Rogerborg]

Apropos your emo-diary, the "intelligent" drink-drive limit that sentients impose on themselves is zero.

Re:The answer is...

[Hognoxious]

Ever been to Milton Keynes? I'd say your estimate is a little high.

What about Earth's sidekick?

[MollyB]

I'm no expert, but isn't our "planet" really a binary system, since the Moon contributes so much to the habitability of the Earth by stabilizing our rotational axis?

I realize the precision needed to detect the tiny wobble of an exoplanet is beyond our present capacity, but shouldn't our search planning include factors like the above (if they don't already)? I'd greatly appreciate an informed opinion on this.

Re:What about Earth's sidekick?

[natehoy]

How about an uninformed one?

We honestly don't know the conditions under which life could form. About the only thing that is certainly required is some source of energy, and even that doesn't necessarily need to come from sources we'd recognize. Of course, finding "life as we know it" is the most efficient because we'd be the best equipped to recognize it and possibly communicate with it. Finding "life as we understand it" would be somewhat less easy and less likely to communicate with, and "life as we can't possibly imagine it today" would probably just remain undetected. Do you KNOW if that shade of blue in your drapes is intelligent? How would you be equipped to recognize its motivations? You'd just think of it as a shade of blue and move on. Meanwhile, it's laughing at me. Maybe I'm the only one who can tell it's intelligent, or maybe I'm overdue for the yellow pill today.

So a detail like a moon, while important to some of the habitability concerns of our own oxygen-breathing selves, and especially important to species that have come to depend on the tides, is probably very unimportant in terms of the development of a life form. It may, however, be somewhat important if we find a dozen Earth-like planets, because picking the one with a moon might increase the chances of finding life ever so slightly similar to our own. Or it may turn out to be too insignificant a detail to even consider.

The moon is vital to the survival of many species on this planet, but certainly not all. And if the moon had never existed, there's a very good chance something alive would have evolved on this planet. It might or might not be exactly what we ended up with today, but there'd probably be something posting on slashdot right now (though it might be called tentaclesquib). :)

Gaia hippy shit

[Hognoxious]

Hey, Moonfruit, the sixties are over. If the planet was an organism it would have gone to the galactic doctor and got something to clear that nasty infection.

Re:Gaia hippy shit

[russotto]

Hey, Moonfruit, the sixties are over. If the planet was an organism it would have gone to the galactic doctor and got something to clear that nasty infection.

It has, but there's a wait for the procedure. About 65 million years.

Re:Gaia hippy shit

[Thanshin]

And he therefore has a rising global temperature, which is the same mechanism the body uses to get rid of infections.

Yes. That was, indeed, the joke.

Re:Gaia hippy shit

[Chris Burke]

It has, but there's a wait for the procedure. About 65 million years.

Ah, I see. "Take one meteor impact, call me next epoch"?

Sounds like Earth has an HMO. I wonder if its reached its out of pocket limit for the eon? I hope not or it might start going to get a lot more treatment.

Re:The answer is...

[mcgrew]

Well, intelligence is relative. Compared to what we evolve into in the next ten million years we probably AREN'T intelligent.

But what about the dolphins?

Re:The answer is...

[Fred_A]

Well, intelligence is relative. Compared to what we evolve into in the next ten million years we probably AREN'T intelligent.

But what about the dolphins?

Very unlikely that there will be any dolphins in 10 million years...

Now cockroaches...

Re:The answer is...

[Anonymous Coward]

zero. Zero worlds containing intelligent life of any kind. Earth included.

Aw, how Emo. Go cut yourself and write a song about it..

an untestable conjecture

[petes_PoV]

Even if someone/thing was able to visit all the start systems and planets in our galaxy, they wouldn't come up with an answer. As the time it would take to do the measurement would be so long that civilisations would have been born, developed and vanished during the counting period. That alone would make the theory useless, and until we have the ability to detect even one other form of life: intelligent or not, there is not even one single calibration point.

Treat this as a bit of fun, but don't spend any money on it.

Insightful?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Really? I would have thought the "Der! Hooman iz teh stoopid" posts would be Redundant around here by now. Or have they ascended (read: descended) to the rank of Obligatory?

And I always suspect most posts like that translate to "Other people dare to deviate from my perfect, genius opinions, dammit, and therefore humanity has no intelligence!"

The Drake Equation?

[Tetsujin]

Honestly, I'm not surprised people are finding fault with the Drake Equation. I mean, it was written up by Ludwig Von Drake! He's not a proper scientist at all, he's just a cartoon! You can't rely on cartoon characters to do your science for you, it's not sensible... And you've got to question the repeatability of any experiment taking place in a cartoon environment...

Re:The answer is...

[SETIGuy]

Intelligence != rich material culture (aka "civilization").

Former is unavoidable result of evolutionary arms race while latter is a just a quirk of random and unlikely circumstances leading to its origin.

Actually, its likely that the former is also just a quirk of random and unlikely circumstances as well. Life existed for 3.5 billion years on Earth with nothing more intelligent than a single celled organism evolving. There's no reason to believe that it couldn't have gone on that way for much longer. Going from single celled to multicelled organisms was a difficult step.

You can actually do some simple math to figure out how many "difficult steps" there were in our evolution. By "difficult step" I mean one that is unlikely to be accomplished in the available time. The simplest way to estimate is to calculate what fraction of the available time for intelligence to evolve did it take intelligence to evolve. The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and what we would describe as intelligent species arose about 50 million years ago (or, in essence, now). Current estimates are that the Earth will become inhospitable to life in 0.5 to 1 billion years. So there are 5 to 5.5 billion years available for intelligent life to arise, and it took 4.5 billion years to happen. That means there are probably about 5.5/(5.5-4.5)=5.5 to 5/(5-4.5)=10 "difficult steps" in development of intelligence. That means it probably doesn't exist in any form on most life bearing planets.

In habitable places in universe, if we ever get to them, there will probably be life and if there is life there will probably be intelligent beings, like dolphins, dogs, parrots, etc. , but don't hold your breath for alien civilizations.

I wouldn't even hold your breath for multicellular organisms on most life bearing planets. An ocean full of photosynthesizing slime might be the best bet.

The Drake Gamble

[StikyPad]

It's a scientific imperative, and a recurring theme on Slashdot, that a sufficient sample size is necessary to draw a meaningful conclusion. And when it comes to planets we've sufficiently explored, our sample size is somewhere between 1 and 3, including Earth. We *believe* the moon is devoid of life, which is probably accurate since it's the moon is a relatively static environment, and life tends to alter its environment. We *suspect* that life is absent from Mars, but we don't know for sure. For all we know, there are planets in our own solar system that are teeming with life. The only thing we can say with any degree of confidence is that the odds of life inhabiting a given body are less than 1 and greater than 0, and that we have yet to observe extraterrestrial life.

Now it makes sense to extrapolate from our observations, but only when we have sufficient data, and drawing *any* conclusions from 1-3 points out of of billions is insane, no matter how rational it may *feel*. It's the very root of superstition. If we count the moon as a second data point, and that's still a leap of faith, then the incidence of life is 50/50. If we found bacteria on Mars, then we suddenly have data showing that life is more likely than not, and confirming evidence that 100% of worlds containing water also have life.

Given the above, trying to make predictions based on the observed data is worse than useless -- it's detrimental. It limits our focus and makes us oblivious to alternatives. It's the scientific equivalent of believing that a broken mirror brings bad luck, or that angry gods cause lightning. After all, why investigate the source of lightning when we already know that it was caused by our sin? Why investigate arid worlds when we know that life requires water? Such beliefs make us oblivious to the truth, even when we're staring it in the face.

The Drake Equation, and its variants, are nothing more than a roll of the dice or the flip of a coin at this point. Let's treat them as such, and move on.

Re:The answer is...

[Zontar The Mindless]

According to Wikipedia, it's more like 25% of men and 15% of women. What studies provide figures that differ by that much?