The Drake Equation
During the last few hundred years, development of the science of astronomy has moved forward by lightyears — literally. Galileo developed and improved the telescope in 1609 (the first telescope was built by a Dutch-german inventor named Lippershey a year earlier) and saw the four largest moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
In 1924, Edwin Hubbell used infra-red imaging to discover our galaxy, the Via Lactea, wasn’t the only galaxy in the universe. Today we know there are at least two trillion galaxies. Light-years. In fact, there may be a thousand times that number of galaxies that have accelerated away to beyond the speed of light, which means we will NEVER see them. (Nothing can travel faster than light, but the universe can EXPAND faster than light. Go figure…)
The most important question that has emerged in that time is this: Are we alone? Religious fundamentalists immediately protested: “The Bible says that a supreme being created humans on earth, and the Bible doesn’t mention life being created elsewhere. So we must be alone“— or words to that effect.
Happily, nonsense like that has almost disappeared. But until our galactic neighbors show up and light up a fingertip, we’ll have to estimate. So how do we do this?
In 1961, a young astronomer named Frank Drake in Green Bank, W.V. came up with an equation that plausibly provides a means of estimating the likely number of planets containing intelligent life. Here it is:
N = R * f p n e f i f c L where
R = the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy
f p = the fraction of those stars that have planets
n e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
f l = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
f i = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
f c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
It’s not an exact estimate, but rather a probabilistic one. That’s really the only way to do it. We use statistics to estimate lots of things that can’t be conceptualized in any other way. Estimates told us how many people were likely to die of COVID-19 within months of its first detection, and the estimates were pretty accurate.
The fact that they’re not exact doesn’t render them less useful. Our understanding of the nature of the tiniest particles of matter is completely based on quantum mechanics, which relies 100 percent on probabilities. They calculate results that are accurate to five decimal places. You don’t have to understand how they work to understand they DO work.
The values of the variables in this equation are constantly evolving. I have an astronomy textbook printed in 1965 that confidently states there are 100,000 stars in the Milky Way. Based on the latest observations made by the Hubbell telescope, the actual number of stars in the Milky Way is closer to TWO BILLION (https:// earthhow.com/milky-way-galaxy/). Like I said, it’s an estimate. But we can assign a best guess to each of those parameters, and based on current best guesses, N equals, as Carl Sagan would say, “billions and billions.”
That’s a lot of little green men.
But that last term is ominous. L represents how long a civilization lasts before it self-destructs, as in a global thermonuclear war.
What’s happening in recent decades seems to tell us the value of L is growing smaller and smaller. Each half of our country thinks if the other half were dead, it would Make America Great Again. Vladimir Putin seems willing to nuke the planet’s population out of existence if he doesn’t get to be known as the reincarnation of Peter the Great.
Nearly half of our voters believe every lie our wannabe dictator tells, and would like to put a pathological liar and con man in control of the football — the box with the nuclear launch codes. Sometimes it does feel like it’s 12 minutes to midnight.
If we can’t return rational thinking to the democratic process, we’re going to put another Stalin or Hitler or dictator-du-jour in power, and he’s going to kill everybody to get even with the world for not worshiping and adoring him enough to match his swollen ego. When that happens, we’ll have to add a “minus one” to the end of the Drake Equation, because we’ll be gone forever.
Inform yourself before you vote. It matters more than you can possibly imagine.
Les Pinter is a contributing columnist and a Springville resident. His column appears weekly in The Recorder. Pinter’s book, HTTPV: How a Grocery Shopping Website Can Save America, is available in both Kindle and hardcopy formats on Amazon.com.contact him at lespinter@earthlink.net