Gertz had just called Frank Drake a dear friend and a lovely man, then dismissed the formula Drake is remembered for. He and Krauss were working through why nobody has heard from anyone; Gertz's answer is that the field's founding equation is a sacred cow that survives on sentiment. The longest chapter of his book is about taking it apart.
situation and stay right in your own solar system. And you said you're going to get there, so I'll let you do that. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, and this idea that you have to keep moving outward and also have to contact people. Even that part will get to. It's not clear that, you know, as you'll argue, contacting, it's bad for us to contact other aliens. It might, they have come to the same conclusion. So the fact they haven't been reaching out with their signals to us or coming to visit us is not too surprising. Sheltering in place, and the fact that basically for biological systems, interstellar travel is more or less impossible. And it's a laws of physics. It's not something when we discover some new law of quantum gravity that's going to change anything because you still have to encounter Newton's laws and the energetics of sending a spacecraft and food and culture and survival and all the rest. But so there is this, so they're not coming. They're not traveling to us. The question is, are they going to communicate to us? Are they going to send out a signal? And we haven't heard anything, even any signals. And Fermi was saying we haven't seen any signs. But then, as you point out, that SETI has been going for many years. We haven't seen anything. It's called the Great Silence. We haven't heard anything or seen anything. And there could be two reasons for that, as you point out. One, we've simply not looked hard and long enough. And two, we're not looking at the right way. And I think the point of the rest of your book is both are true. And that's a fundamental problem. And you codify it by, I was very happy to see, I knew Frank Drake as well, a lovely man, and you worked with him as well. But much of the field is based often based on something called the Drake equation, which calling it an equation, it seems to me, is an insult to equations because it's more a mnemonic. It's not a mnemonic. And it doesn't really allow you to calculate anything. It just make it allows you to make wild estimates that anyone can make and come up with vastly different answers.
It's worse than that, Lawrence. I mean, I should say that Frank was a dear friend and close colleague. And a lovely man. Lovely, lovely person. You know, knew him as well. Lovely man. His eponymous equation, the Drake equation, is absolutely ready for the ash heap of history. It's completely worthless from beginning to end. And
you call it a sacred cow, and I was reminded of the
longest chapter in my book called And it's great because it
allows you to codify the problems. That's why I want to go through it because I think it's really informative. But it did remind me when you talk about Drake of the famous statement, you didn't come to praise Caesar, but to bury him. That's the way it is about the equation. So the equation, the equation says, and I guess I'll read it out now, at least in the terms you give it. The number of intelligent civilizations out there that we can communicate with or have communicated to us is related to, so there's a term, there's a term, and we'll go term by term. R star, which is related to the rate of star formation in his original term. FP, the fraction of stars with planets times Ne, the number of Earth-like planets per system, per star system. Then F L, the number of those that actually bear life. And then FI, the fraction of those of life-forming planets that have intelligent life. And then there's an F, then there's an FC, which is the fraction of those that want to communicate with us. And then there's an L, the length of time that they've been trying to communicate to us. And interestingly enough, the first time you plug some reasonable estimates through there, you get 10,000, which is the number that Frank Drake got. But of course, other estimates will give zero to a billion or more.