There Probably Have Been Aliens

Re:There Probably Have Been Aliens by ghaff on Monday January 23, 2017 @12:56PM (#13464172)

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.

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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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant

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Re:There Probably Have Been Aliens by ghaff on Monday January 23, 2017 @05:39PM (#13466831)

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).

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