[Kevmo]

There must be literally billions of civilizations out there! Simply because the universe is so big and huge and vast,because there’s just so much room?
***The original SETI project assumed that there might be one planet per sun that is in the habitable zone. It’s a reasonable enough assumption. But then it assumed a 1/100 chance of life evolving from nothing, surviving the process, and getting to the point of being intelligent to generate radio waves.

http://www.rae.org/enzymes.html

Coppedge’s calculations of 1 in 10^123 for the formation of a protein of 445 amino acids in length, and 1 in 10^29345 for the formation of an aggregate of proteins minimal for the existence of life are computed on the basis of the left-handed amino acid problem alone.

So the SETI project was off by 29,343 orders of magnitude. It only needs to be off by 50 orders of magnitude to be impossible, by the mathematical definition.

I wonder if I opened a heap of bank accounts all over the place and applied Drake’s equation to it would I get rich?

[MHGinTN]

The numbers are ... staggering aren't they! IIRC, it used to be stated that there are only like 10¹²⁰ atoms in the Universe. At Reasons.org, Ross&CO are adding to the impossibility of spontaneous eruption of intelligent life, nearly every week. Even Physicists are beginning to come around to the idea that an inteliigence is behind the creation of the Universe and especially existence of intelligent life therein.

[mitch5501]

"So the SETI project was off by 29,343 orders of magnitude"

bank accounts