I am making a thread about the Fermi Paradox not because I have anything new or interesting to say about the Fermi Paradox, but simply because I love thinking about it and talking about it and hearing new ideas about it... and I'm working under the well-established assumption that 'if you build it they will come', so this is me building it!
Here is where I might insert a cutely packaged anecdote about how the initial formulation was created, but I am not going to - go read Wiki, ya lazy sod!
Instead...
I include a sentence referring to both Fermi and Drake because it's the Drake Equation and thinking about the factors involved in that formulation which produces the question: where are all the bloody aliens?
You can plug in your own numbers here:
Conservative estimates produce anything from 5000 to 20,000 species. It's a good way to make note of some of the core variables involved.
The thing I love about this topic is how well it refines one's thinking. I've seen very smart people become absolutely baffled by their own thought processes here. A great example is actually a component of the Drake Equation itself. We can postulate x number of species as having evolved, got radios, lived 100,000 years and still have died out such a long time ago that there's no overlap between us and them even in radiowaves, or in fact between any of the tens of thousands of notional technological species - each could have lived ion an island of time even if physical space was in their grasp.
I believe the last time I plugged in numbers, I got 5... and thought I was being excessively optimistic.
Here is where I might insert a cutely packaged anecdote about how the initial formulation was created, but I am not going to - go read Wiki, ya lazy sod!
Instead...
Fermi paradox - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The Fermi paradox..... is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability (such as some optimistic estimates for the Drake equation).
I include a sentence referring to both Fermi and Drake because it's the Drake Equation and thinking about the factors involved in that formulation which produces the question: where are all the bloody aliens?
You can plug in your own numbers here:
Drake Equation Calculator
A simple online calculator to estimate how many alien civilizations we might be able to contact.
www.spacecentre.nz
Conservative estimates produce anything from 5000 to 20,000 species. It's a good way to make note of some of the core variables involved.
The thing I love about this topic is how well it refines one's thinking. I've seen very smart people become absolutely baffled by their own thought processes here. A great example is actually a component of the Drake Equation itself. We can postulate x number of species as having evolved, got radios, lived 100,000 years and still have died out such a long time ago that there's no overlap between us and them even in radiowaves, or in fact between any of the tens of thousands of notional technological species - each could have lived ion an island of time even if physical space was in their grasp.
I believe the last time I plugged in numbers, I got 5... and thought I was being excessively optimistic.