Recalculating the Drake Equation: a Fresh Look at Astronomy’s Biggest Questionthedebrief.org/recalculating-the-drake-equation-the-seti-institute-funds-a-fresh-look-at-astronomys-biggest-question/
183 sats \ 1 comment \ @DEADBEEF 24 Oct aliens_and_UFOs
The SETI Institute has announced it is now accepting applications for the 2025 Frank Drake Postdoctoral Fellowship, named after the 20th-century astrophysicist who first developed a formula to quantify the number of civilizations in the universe capable of radio communication called the Drake Equation.
According to the Institute, the new fellowship will allow early-career scientists to “make impactful contributions” across a range of scientific disciplines that support “groundbreaking research in the search for life in the universe.” These disciplines include traditional fields of study like astronomy, geological sciences, and astrophysics but also incorporate more nascent areas of inquiry such as astrobiology, biosignature detection, and technosignature detection.
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Fortunately, unlike SETI Institute programs that may fail to identify genuinely alien objects or signals, such as the 2024 program that failed to discover signs of a supercivilizations after scanning over 2,800 galaxies, post-doctoral students awarded the Frank Drake Fellowship will have the opportunity to work on core science principles that support the search for life and improve the accuracy of the variable posited by Drake over sixty years ago.
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28 sats \ 0 replies \ @OneOneSeven 24 Oct

Rather than asking how many civilizations may exist now, we ask ‘Are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?'

The result? By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe’s 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22nd power.
“One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,” says Frank. “To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history!”
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