click for full interactive Drake Dashboard
On a road trip with a buddy who is also a Deep-Sky automated Photography hobbyist (check out Seestar, DwarfLab, and Odyssey Pro), we discussed the Drake Equation (him) and the Rare Earth Hypothesis (me).
We went deep.
Frank Drake said he created his eponymous equation as a “conversation starter.” It has served that purpose very well, but as a legitimate thesis and/or honest exploration of whether we are alone or not, it comes up short. 1
I wanted to noodle with the ideas behind his thesis, so I asked Perplexity to create an interactive dashboard of all 7 variables.
The results were really impressive.
It’s exactly the sort of project AI is perfect for: a well-understood formula, a simple way to display it, and a set of code that would be time-consuming and annoying to hack together on your own.
Click through and play around with the sliders. Depending on your assumptions, we either live in a galaxy filled with millions of other advanced civilizations or are all alone.
Fun stuff!
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1. I like the Rare Earth hypothesis, but its just so negative. “Rare” — a handful of civilizations reach advanced technological state — is quite different than “Practically Never” — human civilization is an aberration and most galaxies have no intelligent or technologically advanced systems. I guess I am a touch more optimistic than a “Post-Kepler Moderate,” which implies that one intelligent technologically advanced civilization per 50-100 galaxies.
I have been thinking about doing a deep dive as to why the Drake Equation is so deeply flawed, but that will have to wait for another day…
