Re:60 years later, is it time to update the Drake equation?
by s1artibartfast on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @05:45PM
(#27201646)
Why do anything?
Any questions of resource allocation ultimately come down to a question individual and social values, or merit, as you phrased it.
Merit is inherently arbitrary. Some people can and do think answering the question of the existence of extraterrestrial life has intrinsic merit and is the single most important society could do. More important than improving global prosperity or even continuation of the species.
The Drake equation is treated as fodder for late-night Cheetos-driven college sophomore discussions. But we use it, and siblings, to estimate the inestimable: how much value do we get out of a dollar put towards actually investigating this?
No matter what the field, it's always all over the map. Do we want to spend gigabucks on an LHC successor in the hopes of a vast payoff? Do we want to spend megabucks on this specific line of cancer research? Or should we spend the same money on thousands of kilobuck experiments in everything from economics to psychology to polymer chemistry?
It's even harder when there isn't actually a dollar value attached. Even if we discover alien life, what's the merit of that? Economically, perhaps nothing, other than sales of "I wanted to believe/and I was right" tee shirts. But in terms of satisfaction, perhaps more than all of the movies and video games ever made put together.
That's why we spend so much effort trying to estimate priors that we know are too wild to be of actual value in that calculation. Playing with the Drake equation is fun. That's all. But it does also ultimately inform the expenditure of some resources, even if we don't actually do the math.