Quote:
Originally Posted by T@T
The Drake Equation estimates about 2000 intelligent life forms on other planets with at least human capabilities in our galaxy alone, bring in the crazy size of the whole universe and you have the probability of around 0% of intelligent life not being common.
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The Drake equation can estimate just about any number depending on what you put into the variables, several of which are complete unknowns that could vary over many orders of magnitude. I find that physicists and astronomers tend to put in higher values for some of the "unknowns" than biologists do in general. I get around 1 intelligent life form per galaxy, and have seen others come up with much lower estimates than that. We just don't have the data to get a meaningful number out of the equation right now though - it's just wild guesses.