The Search for Aliens
StarTalk Radio
00:00
The Drake Equation
Frank Drake was a famous astronomer who wanted to organize our understanding of the likelihood of finding intelligent life in the universe. He assembled these terms of an equation, which when you multiply them all together, at the end, the number you get is the number of intelligent life forms you would find in the galaxy. The most uncertain part of this equation is a civilization capable of actually sending radio signals out into space. And if you do that, I'd say maybe there could be anywhere between 20 and 100 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, that we could communicate with.
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