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Outputs of the Drake Equation are looking better and better, but I'm starting to worry that detecting intelligent life is going to be much harder that we previo
by hliyan 6y ago
Outputs of the Drake Equation are looking better and better, but I'm starting to worry that detecting intelligent life is going to be much harder that we previously thought. Even if a million radio-capable civilizations arose within the Milky Way, what are the chances of two such civilizations within a distance of say 100 light years having that capability at the same time?
Even then, the chances of contact seem slim. The other day, I was doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see what's needed for a near-Earth colony (say at about 5 light years) to send data back to Earth. Even with the tightest possible beam, even after pumping a massive amount of power into the transmitter, even after using square-kilometers worth of receivers, very little signal seemed to get through.
I'm starting to feel like there might be a lot of needles out there in a cosmic haystack that we'll never be able to sort out in our civilization's lifetime...
- ponker 6y agoI’m pessimistic on the Drake equation because the single data point we have, ourselves, makes it look like after a civilization reaches radio capability it might quickly turn to over-harvesting of resources and in a few thousand years eliminate its advanced civilizations and return to a primitive state.
- c3534l 6y agoIntelligent life seems rare on Earth. We all seem to like it a lot, but we're the only ones in the entire history of Earth, we've not been around for very long, and we seem to be slowly sabotaging our existence. How far could someone with our technology actually pick up the signals we sent out? How many planets are realistically in that range? Then again, our existence on Earth is so brief and recent, for how long have we been looking? Less than a hundred years. That's barely anything when you talk about planets and galaxies.