What Are The Odds Of Alien Life? The Drake Equation

What is the Drake Equation? We are talking about The Odds of ALIEN LIFE.
Is there life out there in the Universe?
How are the chances to find Extraterrestrial life?

We don't know the answers to a lot of questions, for example:
How many alien societies exist, and are detectable?
Even though we don't know how to answer such a question, we can at least try to figure it out with a little help from our beloved...Math.
First, we have to have a pretty good idea about how the universe works, and of course about the star and planetary formation, as well as conditions for life as we know it. This means we have to study and collect a lot of data. Luckily for us, we – humans - aren't so bad. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and all-natural sciences offer us the hints for the mathematical set of parameters that will give us an equation to calculate the number of alien societies that exist and are detectable. 
Second, one has to sit down and think about which parameters should appear in the equation, and which not. 
Do you think it's difficult? I think so. 
But luckily for us, in 1961 scientists Drake came up with a famous equation, that estimated the number of transmitting societies in the Milky Way Galaxy. .

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Credits: Nasa/Shutterstock/Storyblocks/Elon Musk/SpaceX/ESA/ESO/ Flickr

Video Chapters:
00:00 Intro
03:05 What is the Drake equation?
05:35 The problems with the drake equation
11:21 List of the most reliable estimates of the parameters hat apear in the Drake Equation

#insanecuriosity #alienlife #drakeequation

[ChickSage]

We dont know what the odds are that life will form on a planet, so there is no way to estimate how much life is out there. It should be called Drake's mistake.

[MrBriangold]

Nice video, good explanation of the equation and a fun little example at the end.
If the 'estimates' are in the right ball park (HUGE assumption) then there are 22.1 other intelligent species in our galaxy (assuming also we consider ourselves "intelligent")
But does it matter? If there were a thousand more intelligent species scattered at say average distances in the galaxy then we still could not communicate with them. They'd be too far away and speed of light restrictions would means communications would take thousands of years. Don't even think about visiting... The nearest star is 4.2 light years away and to travel there in the fastest way currently possible would take 50, 000 years or so. Maybe a little less but that's still longer than civilisation has been around (20, 000 years?)  
The distances and remoteness are just ridiculous concepts to consider.
Then again, it's the timing that's important also. In the 4.5 Bn years Earth has been around homo sapiens (us) have only been around for about 300, 000 years which is 0.007% of the time. If the Earth is one year old that means we've only been here for approximately the last 30 minutes. What are the chances other species are around at the same time as us?

More questions than answers but that's the point (and purpose) of the Drake Equation - not to get the answer but to make us think about what's needed to get one.

[Jason-xfym]

The dinosaurs were extremely successful without needing intelligence. If there's any complex life, I would it could be something like that.

[Mr_Oggie]

Much of what we know about space and the universe is just guesswork and speculation... granted that it is educated guesswork and speculation, but in the end it is just some of our smartest minds making a guess and trying to fill in a whole lot of blanks.

[plozar]

Isn't it intriguing that with all of our technology, we haven't a clue as to even a single other civilization? This Drake equation, seemingly, must have some glaring parameters missing from it.

[HIK_]

Drake Equation may as well be a magic mirror.
Anything we can't quantify or at least approximate is mere speculation. I've seen numbers for L as low as 500yrs (arguably more plausible) which means fewer than one alien civilization... Idle navel-gazing

[alberto]

If all the values are set to the minimum in the equation there is 63 civilisations in this galaxy alone !! X times number of galaxies = billions …. So yes life as we know it is just one off . 😪

[MrOvergryph]

There has to be alien life among the stars. It is an impossibility that there is only one. The universe has never made just 1 of anything. And before you say "it's not impossible, it's improbable, " let me tell you the story about the bear cave. One day, a man stumbled upon a cave and asked the question, "is there a bear in the cave?" He researched the maximum lifespan of bears and got a number. He researched how often bears had to leave their cave and got a number. After all his research was finished, he then surveyed the outside of the cave every day for the required number of days and saw no evidence suggesting the presence of a living bear. Confident in his research, he went in to the cave and found out he was correct, there was no bear. It was not improbable. It was physically impossible. He knew it was impossible without any direct evidence only because he looked at all the other evidence. Look around. Nature never just makes 1 of anything.

The end.

Plot twist: the man didn't know about the cave's back entrance and was mauled by a bear.

RIP

[fernandochaves]

23 seems an optimistic number even for an entire galaxy.

If we only could measure chance... Chance plays a very significant role in all this.

Intelligence is not a direct product of evolution i think, but a product of brains with potential, pressed to become better by experience, practice and the necessity to solve problems.

[wingsabre]

I thought of another variable which the equation does not account for, which is the number of solar system with only a single star. What if life can only appear in a system where there’s a single star?

[peterclark]

When Ma Nature grafts the opposable thumb on a herbivore that society might be able the overcome the Fermi paradox (the final variable in the Drake Equation). When grafted onto carnivores it does nothing to reduce the use of violence as a problem-solving mechanism. For all the Vegans, it isn't eating meat, its just the high level at which violence appears when solving a problem, which they share because they have the same genome.

[model]

Then there is the Fermi Paradox. Cest la vie

[mm-dwrr]

A question that may never find an answer.

P.S "l guess"! 😫

[kieselguhrkid]

This video is fundamentaly incomplete without talking about the "Wolowitz Coefficient"

[riassslave]

believe it or not i expected it to either be 23 or a variable of it no more than 7 x 23 though & that is from the amount of times those two number coincide specifically with human existence ....from chromosomes to blood circulation to seasonal variation 23 seems rooted to key components of existence why wouldn't it be realized elsewhere just as fundamentally as it is here, doesn't seem a stretch to me, but of course i could never speak for or assume to for anyone else...great episode!L8rsk8r

[anonymouse]

So when I crunched the numbers before watching I got N = 25.7 and … what did I do wrong?

[mybuckhead]

Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, the Universe is infinite and has always been here. That means that life on other planets will be a lot. We will be inhabiting other plants soon Our bodies will change related to differences on these plants.

[mityaboy]

we might never know the real number but it is at least 1 in our galaxy :) so even with that we have billions of opportunities for intelligent life in the universe.
given the fact that there are so many galaxies with so many stars within them and with soooo many planets, even if the chances are ridiculously low, the sheer number of opportunities are bringing the numbers back to above 1.
as for meeting them or hearing their transmissions… well… thats going to be near impossible with current technology
we really need warp and whatnot to get beyond our bubble of silence

and thats a long way from here (sadly)

[jan_phd]

People on youtube don't know what 'odds' means. Let me put this way, you cannot divide by zero.

[ittr]

Sophisticated equation with but one factor that is significant, fl (the fraction of planets on which life actually appears). Is it higher than zero? if not the entire result is zero.

So the real equation falls back to that one simple question and you can throw out all the other factors as irrelevant until it is answered. Irrelevant because you can have the greatest habitat imaginable for a certain lifeform to live in but that has absolutely no bearing on whether that lifeform will ever evolve there. Life from nonlife is a complicated business, ridiculously complicated. And it is not an exaggeration to say that you could have a trillion such perfect habitats that will never see life.

This idea that life fourishes in the universe springs i think from the old saying that if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter and wait long enough, eventually he will produce a work of Shakespear. No he won't! Even if he has an eternity in which to work. With no understanding of what the keys represent he would likely find one patern of key strokes that enertain him and keep repeating them. The best you might get would be something you'd expect from say Jack Torrence. And that is a stretch. Same situation goes for abiogenesis. Natural selection does not kick in until after life has evolved. And without that guiding hand potential life chemistry is going to get stuck in countless cul-de-sacs making the same mistakes over and over again with nothing internal to tell it to try something else.

And that is the bottom line with regard to extraterrestrial life. Sure there are a trillion planets in a typical galaxy and sure there are trillions of galaxies. But life is just so absurdly complicated, even at its most rudimentary level that it is not illogical to deduce that it may have happened only a handful of times. Or maybe even only once. Perhaps you need a universe as massive as ours just to produce one life force possessing living cell. So as I said, until you unravel that fundamental question of what the probability is of life evolving from nonlife on its own. it is silly to even look into the other factors in the Drake Equation. That equation is for fools.