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| Topic | Drake Equation is a tautology and you should be ashamed of taking it seriously. |
| sellerdore 04/12/24 5:35:54 PM #22: | RetuenOfDevsman posted...
I mean, look. I can do it too. Ever wondered how many ants there are in the world? It's the number of ants in an anthill times the number of anthills.to play devil's advocate for a second -- let's say we DO want to calculate how many ants there are in the world. your "equation" would be incorrect because lots of ants don't even build/live in anthills; they can live in completely-underground colonies, in trees, etc. And even some ants don't even care about ant hills; they just build temporary residences overnight and leave the next day. so, the "equation" would be : # of ants in the world = ( avg # of ant hills in the world * avg # of ants who live in a typical ant hill ) + ( avg # of ant-bearing trees * avg # of ants who live in those trees ) + ( avg # of ants who don't build hills ) + ...etc etc etc even if this is totally handwavey and made up, i'd argue this is actually a useful exercise and not tautological at all, because it breaks down the larger estimation problem into more manageable estimates (albeit at a very high level) and it establishes (general) mathematical relationships between them. this is pretty much what the Drake equation was only ever meant to do -- an attempt to rationalize the very large problem of extraterrestrial life into a set of smaller problems/math relationships that can be tackled/estimated more easily. It's a ballpark/back of the envelope type of thing. it was never meant to be a formal definition of anything AFAIK --- "Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs..." http://www.last.fm/user/kmal415 ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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