Re:There Probably Have Been Aliens
by dtparr on Monday January 23, 2017 @12:41PM
(#13464003)
I suppose, but having more precise terms in the first half doesn't seem to really do much for us given that the terms dealing with the probability of life forming can't even really be estimated. This article is basically saying "surely it's more than 1 in 10^22", but I don't see any hint of why that would be, other than 'it's such a small chance that it had to be written in italics'.
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Right. What's happened with the Drake Equation is that the terms related to possibly habitable planets have largely moved to the "almost certainly lots" realm.
But, as you say, with respect to life (or at least complex multi-cellular life), we just don't know. But the Drake Equation encourages thinking like, even it's it's a 1 in a trillion chance effectively zero!, we'd have all these aliens running around. Because 1 in a trillion = 0 is pretty much what we're informed by day-to-day usage and intuition.
Re:There Probably Have Been Aliens
by JumpCrisscross on Monday January 23, 2017 @01:34PM
(#13464567)
> Because 1 in a trillion = 0 is pretty much what we're informed by day-to-day usage and intuition
Avogadro's constant is 6.022 x 10^23 [1]. There are a hundred billion sets of a trillion constituent particles in ever mol of anything. A reaction that happens to water once in a trillion years would occur 20,000 times a second for each 18 mL of water.
You're being an engineer :-) Yes, I am aware of those things but those sorts of numbers do not correspond to day-to-day usage and intuition of most people (as I said).