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While it may be apocryphal, it's said that Drake described the equation as a means of "organizing our ignorance". That is, it's not meant to be applied literall

While it may be apocryphal, it's said that Drake described the equation as a means of "organizing our ignorance". That is, it's not meant to be applied literally, but rather as a means of focusing discussion on the relevant parameters. In that sense, I think it's been phenomenally successful.

monocasa 10y ago
Exactly. First step in knowing something like that is putting into words what we don't know. And it's not insurmountable; the data from the Kepler spacecraft is giving us quite a bit of data that may go a long way to building a statistical model for one of the unknown variables.