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Drake, Hanson, and the meaning of life

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The physicist Enrico Fermi once looked up at lunch conversation and asked: “Where is everyone?”He meant aliens. The galaxy has >100 billion stars, >1 t...

The physicist Enrico Fermi once looked up at lunch conversation and asked: “Where is everyone?” He meant aliens. The galaxy has >100 billion stars, >1 tn planets. So we shouldn’t be alone - we should see lots of signals. Shouldn’t we? Decades later, this argument was made one notch clearer with the Drake Equation . (It’s just basic physics plus the product rule plus a bunch of guesses.) It aims at the expected number of visible civs in our galaxy. It’s usually criticised as approximate, statistical, not really science, vast uncertainties, strong assumptions. But it’s better than nothing as a t

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