Re:60 years later, is it time to update the Drake equation?
by rektide on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @02:04PM
(#27198622)
The amazing thing about the Drake Equation is that it's a funneling pipeline where we're spitballing numbers with huge orders of magnitudes difference across different people's guesses. They're just random guesses, where one person says one particular odds are one in a million, the other guy says one in a billion, the other gal says one in a trillion. Yet in spite of a huge range, for each of the winnowing factors in this funnel, the odds of there being life are often significant.
Which is to say, two things are certainly true:
The universe is incredibly fantastically basically unimaginably vast. Practically countless (~10 million estimated) super-clusters of galaxies dot the heavens. There's just so many chances, so many opportunities, so much probability that, if you believe in life arising from a primordial soup, seem almost certain to be replicated.
Sometimes chaos, in it's fumbling teaming randomness, happens upon patterns. Patterns which sometimes stick, which sometimes reproduce, which sometimes grow. Entropy amid complex systems sometimes produces it's own enclaves of stability, sometimes.
The other true fact is that time is long and deep. Life on earth is not a flash in the pan, not an instant thing; it emerged slowly, over time, in differing waves, across time. The promise that life, once began, has a chance to ride these waves of time & to become significant, that it grows to fill rich biodiverse roles, grows to complete, that it thrives: if we believe in the soup of life, believe in the complex chemistries that powers cells, and believe in time, then a belief in other life seems not certain, but to me, highly highly probable.
Which is to say, two things are certainly true:
The universe is incredibly fantastically basically unimaginably vast. Practically countless (~10 million estimated) super-clusters of galaxies dot the heavens. There's just so many chances, so many opportunities, so much probability that, if you believe in life arising from a primordial soup, seem almost certain to be replicated.
Sometimes chaos, in it's fumbling teaming randomness, happens upon patterns. Patterns which sometimes stick, which sometimes reproduce, which sometimes grow. Entropy amid complex systems sometimes produces it's own enclaves of stability, sometimes.
The other true fact is that time is long and deep. Life on earth is not a flash in the pan, not an instant thing; it emerged slowly, over time, in differing waves, across time. The promise that life, once began, has a chance to ride these waves of time & to become significant, that it grows to fill rich biodiverse roles, grows to complete, that it thrives: if we believe in the soup of life, believe in the complex chemistries that powers cells, and believe in time, then a belief in other life seems not certain, but to me, highly highly probable.