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Deflating The Drake Equation
Saying goodbye to dreams of little green men in shiny ships streaking between the stars
As many people know, the astronomer Frank Drake became famous for his thought-experiment equation in which it appears that complex intelligent life should be abundant across the galaxy and by extension across the universe. Unfortunately, Drake’s equation has no scientific validity and its mistakes have helped to encourage to a modern-day belief in technological alien civilizations that is no different from equally unfounded beliefs in angels, ghouls, goblins, gods, and ghosts.
Drake’s equation suffers from many defects and we’ll address some of them in this article. The reader is invited to consider a great many more, at leisure.
The most glaring error in Drake’s naïve equation is the assumption that our Sun is typical of the stars that exist in our galaxy and therefore of the stars present in the two trillion galaxies that are estimated to exist within the observable universe. In reality, however, the most common stars are red dwarfs, comprising more than 70% of the total star count. Our own Sun is actually in the minority, with only around 10% of stars being of this type.
Does this matter? Enthusiasts of the Cult of the Little Green Men argue that although red dwarf stars…
