making statistical arguments like ... there are 8 other planets with moons in our sol. system and none of them has life is very argumentative. First of all we might discover life on some of them and even if we donīt the fact that there is life on only one of them tells us nothing about the rest of teh galaxy... Here are my conclusions:
- I have read the Rare Earth hypothesis and it is very similar to Drakeīs assumptions but for one small difference. The guys that did R.E. assumed that there is little life out there and Drake assumed that there is a lot and both tweaked their equations to produce the desired affect. Itīs the age old optimist vs. pessimist tug-o-war. The real problem is that none of the factors in their equations can be estimated and not to mention all other factors they left out.
- the real questions is how many intelligent life forms are out there ATM. Well given the fact that weīve been monitoring the EM band closely for the Last 70 years and found no TV, radio or other transmissions comming from outer space one can resonably conclude that there are no human-like aliens (close to our tech level) in a radious of 70 light years around Earth.
- for the remaining 90k light years of our galaxy who can say... we simply donīt have enough knowledge to make a resonble estimate. Itīs just not possible.
- what we can say is that if we do find aliens (or they find us) they will either be very very far ahead of us (tech like) or very very behind us. (since it is very very unlikely two cultures will be at the same tech level at any given time) ... but since we just barely climbed out of the stone age ourselves (10.000 years is nothing cmpared to the eones passed) any aliens that we *might* find will most surely be hugely superior to us
ID4 all over again