posted on Jul, 10 2023 @ 12:44 AM
a reply to:
Gothmog
Drake's "equation" is a bit outdated and originally calculated something else; Then ported to alien life as probability.
1% of the stars in a galaxy has a probability of life as we'd call it life(complex). At the low star estimate of the Milky Way(where our solar body
exists) there are one billion stars meaning 10 million stars have 100% probability of complex life. The high estimate of stars in the Milky Way galaxy
is 4 billion stars.
The closest star to ours is 4.2 light years that means traveling at the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second and there are 31,563,000 seconds in
a year... So it's not necessarily are we alone but it's just really far between stars with an average distance between stars being 5 light years.
Mind you there are other objects in the way of that... so logistics of not hitting anything traveling at the speed of light for 4 or 5 years is really
the sort of calculation where an equation like Drake's fits.