It seems to me that there is a sort of congnitive bias at work here. If there are 450 billion chances of something of non-zero probability happening, it’s natural to assume that there’s a pretty good chance the thing will happen. But if you try to do the math, you’ll see the assumption just ain’t so.
Just wanted to pop by and recommend Captured by Aliens, by Joel Achenbach, as a funny and intelligent book for this exact subject.
The "Drake Equation " predicts that there are hundreds of intelligent civilizations residing right here inside our very own Milkey Way.
The
Drake Equation=http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/drake_equation.html
No, it doesn’t necessarily;
it all depends what numbers you put in…evry time I run the figures I only get one or two civilisations-
well, we know there is at least one-
which is us.
(being generous)
Not really - as eburacum45 points out, it all depends on what numbers you put in.
It’s worth emphasizing that uncertainty in any Drake Equation factor is transmitted to the result. So even if we know all the factors except one with utter certainty, we must be uncertain about the result. Just MHO of course.