“Look at it this way. There are billions and billions of planets that can hold life by the Drake equation. (not that that is the be-all, end-all of the discussion, but its a good starting point for my purposes)”
This is maybe, but, there are only a few stars around that can actually support the formation of planets. Even fewer that can produce conditions for life.
It took 3.5 BILLION years for multicell life to appear on Earth. Most stars, and, almost ALL the stars we can see at night, are less that a billion. Most will never make it that far.
Just using Earth as a baseline (we don’t have anything else we can go by) you would have to have a star that is relatively stable, capable of existing for more than 4.5 billion years, and, have to have been at least a third generation star to have the elements in it’s vicinity for life to form JUST to get to where we are now.
Personally, I think we would be incredibly lucky just to find a planet out beyond the solar system that is capable of being terraformed to our needs, to say nothing of being able to just plop down and take over an already usable world, or, finding some kind of civilization already there.
I also think we need to start planning to go and look as fast as possible. The Sun is NOT a stable star and one day we are going to wake up and find the Earth is more like Crematoria from the Riddick movies or Hoth. And there won’t be anything Algore can do about it.
Agreed, Conan. We need to spread across the galaxy and not keep all our eggs in one basket. There’s a theory that humanity came close to the edge of extinction around 12,000 BC and nothing says it can’t happen again.
In fact, with all the near-miss space rocks we’ve seen lately, we might be on borrowed time right now.
Do you know what the Drake Equation is? You missed the entire point, i think.
Even if you use very small possibilities for the variables the result is still a pretty big number - but divided by incredibly huge space it’s very close to zero density.