It has been over sixty years since Fermi asked "Where is everybody?" Recent data from the Kepler telescope suggests that there are about 500 million planets within the habitable zones of their parent stars in our galaxy - far more than most atronomers expected. While this figure does not plug directly into the Drake equation, it does affect the eventual solution. And that number looks even more perplexing now.

So where is everybody?

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What tools do we have that could directly observe other civilizations?

My understanding is even recently when "earth like planets" have been found it's by waiting for the planet to orbit between us and it's star. When the start appears to get dimmer, we know that's really a planet in the way, blocking some percentage of light. If it happens periodically, we can calculate the orbit, guess at the mass, and so on. Finally, this implies that if a planet's plane of orbit is perpendicular to our line of observation, we can't see that planet at all!

If there is a large city on that planet - we have no tools to observe that.

I think all we can really say with certainty at this point is that we don't think any space men are blasting us with strong radio waves.

Also, seti began operations in 1985. That is so frighteningly brief.

We've only been broadcasting for about a century out of ~5 billion years of our star-system's existence (0.000002% of the total span), and only seriously listening for extraterrestrial signals for a couple decades. That's a pretty narrow window, and the odds that some other civilization's window lines up with ours may be pretty small.

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This makes me want to play alpha centauri.

I always think in addition to whatever other messages we're broadcasting into space, we should be sending out;

"On 19x19, if you play R17 we play D16."

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Mornington Crescent!

Best wishes.

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Unfortunately one of the following is likely to be true:

1. Something makes it really hard for a species to evolve as far as we have, making civilizations like ours incredibly rare.
2. Something we haven't yet accomplished is quite likely to destroy our entire species.

The full argument is here. I find it fairly persuasive. http://www.webcitation.org/5n7VYJBUd

Edit: Wikipedia lists some counter-arguments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

Edit 2: You should also read about the Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_Paradox

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Broadcasting is not then only means of comminicating. Indeed, since signal strength decreases in proportion to the square of the distance, radio is not really good for long interstellar differences. Self-replicating probes are better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neuman ... ann_probes

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Examination of the geological record on the planet Earth suggests that species typically last around two million years before becoming extinct. Homo Sapiens is pushing that number right now. Not to say that humans are going to become extinct over night but we'll need a good argument for why humans will be around for much more than a few hundred thousand years There are so many things that could do away with us: pandemics, nuclear war, climate change, asteroids colliding with the Earth, etc. I guess we'd better play go while we still can

The Drake equation has always seemed very unhelpful to me. Any equation with so many perfectly unknowable variables is useless. Even if I spot you an extremely large reservoir of Earth-like planets (which is far from certain at this point), we still don't have any real idea of the rate of abiogenesis (or the rate at which life is wiped off of previously hospitable planets), the rate at which species suitable for sentience evolve (or die off), the rate at which sentient species evolve out of suitable nonsentient species (or die off), the rate at which they become capable of interstellar contact, the rate at which try to engage in interstellar contact, the rate at which they succeed...

And not only can the Drake Equation not tell us anything about the values of any of these variable, the equation can't even assure us that these are the only variables of interest.

(By comparison, imagine an isolated Pacific Island which had forgotten its history of ocean-faring trying to deduce a similar equation to explain the absence of outsiders. What are their chances of even correctly identifying all the relevant variables? Or even one of Brazil's modern-day "uncontacted tribes"... would they remember to include a variable for "creation of a powerful political entity which forbids contact with us to protect our culture and our rights"?)

My instinct is that no civilization ever solves its domestic problems completely enough to invest heavily in interstellar communication/exploration that could only bring benefits after centuries, at best.

If you convert the Drake equation to a lower bound and treat it as an expected value it is almost true as a matter of pure logic & probability.

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Do you mean upper bound?

This article relates to the attempt at communication mentioned earlier...

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/109081/ ... i-meti.htm

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I'm thinking...

The Drake equation is more a way to organize our ignorance on the subject than anything else. Drake said this himself, apparently.

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Don't worry, when the singularity hits, our concepts of intelligent, life, and communication will change drastically, and we'll find that the reason we weren't finding anyone was that we were looking for the wrong things all along.

There's no evidence that bipedal verbally communicating fire based technological organisms are the norm in intelligent evolution, and plenty of evidence that if there were life just like ours, it likely is either not advanced enough, or too advanced, for us to communicate with given current technologies.

300 years ago, radio waves were unknown. It wasn't until 1864 that mathmaticians even posited their existance. Given that, what will we know 300 years from now that we have no imagination to encompass?

The arrogance of man is to assume that both life and communication will be made in his image.

This is what I had in mind when I was suggesting that the Drake Equation, even with all the variable unknown, isn't true as a matter of "pure logic." (I don't think we need to invoke anything as unlikely as a "singularity", though.)

I may be the only one, but I'm hoping the transhumanist state is neither unlikely nor far away. I just believe that at this stage in our existance, at our current technological levels, we are insufficiently prepared for our search for extra terrestrials.

You're right, the Drake equation is insufficient, but I think that's as much the fault of our paradigm as a failure of logic.

I sympathize greatly with the notion that intelligent alien life will probably be a lot less like us than we are likely to think.

However, I don't think it's fair to say that prior to the discovery of radio waves, radio waves were beyond the imaginative capacity of humans. And they certainly didn't require ascension to a transhumanist state in order to comprehend them. Humans from before the discovery of radio waves would have been perfectly capable of communicating with and understanding humans from after the discovery of radio waves. I think generalizing from our past ignorance is good justification for undermining assumptions that there won't be radical discoveries and paradigm shifts around the bend, but that's a far-cry from a technological singularity. For one thing, you're already positing that you know what the new paradigm shift is going to be like, which kind of goes against the whole gist of the example which is to demonstrate how little we have known in the past or how little we have been capable of foretelling what will develop in the future.

I think CSamurai's point is that we are currently looking for extraterrestrial radio messages. In 1800, we might have asked "Why haven't we received any carrier pigeons from extraterrestrials?" In 1800, no one would have ever considered the answer "Because they're not trying to contact us with carrier pigeons, they're trying to contact us with radio waves." In 2200, by analogy, we may realize that radio waves are as impracticable as carrier pigeons when compared to some other mode of communication, the physical principles of which are yet undreamt of.