Been pointing this out for years, but am not an astrophysicist and do not play one on TV (and did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.)
The point of the equation is to identify the parameters. It does that just fine. People trying to use it to solve unsolvable problems are the cause of their own frustration. In a sense, the equation tells us that it’s not a problem we can come close to solving with the amount of data on hand, or that can be expected to be on hand at any forseeable point in the future.
Basically, it’s a warning not to go down the very rabbit hole the author went down. Some things shouldn’t be taken 100% literally and the Drake Equation is one of them.
The Pelozi Paradox:
Every civilization develops liberalism.
No civilization can survive liberalism.
An interesting wrinkle in the Drake equation:
We are at the very center, and therefore the very oldest point of the universe.
This is no real excuse for the Fermi paradox: there’s no reason to suspect that life couldn’t evolve a tiny smidgeon faster than on Earth, what, with all the mass-extinction events we’ve had.
And no, I’m not arguing for Aristotelean cosmology.
It’s a simple quirk of relativity, that wherever an observer is that is the absolute center of the universe, and therefore the point where time has flowed the fastest, making it also the oldest point of the universe.
Life doesn’t happen by itself. There may be compatible planets, but that doesn’t mean life. By the same token, that we exist, other intelligent life could have been created.