James Davenport

So the last 25 years, there has been a really big surge in this field called astrobiology.

And they've tried to answer the parts of that equation like, well, how many stars have planets?

Is it every star?

Is it only stars like our sun?

So now we know that on average, every star roughly has at least one planet.

Wow.

At least one rocky type planet on average.

Wow.

That's so many.

That means there's so many.

That means that for a galaxy of more than 100 billion stars, that means we have at least 100 billion planets to search.

And even still, even after 25 years of astrobiology, we still don't know.

There still is enough unknowns in that equation that we don't know the answer still.

So there's a lot of work to be done.

You can write it in a way that does.

You can write it in such a way that how many civilizations arise.

And what's the likelihood that they live long enough to develop radio telescopes and astronomy and space travel perhaps?

So you can write the equation sort of in different ways.

It's not a strict equation in the same way as Einstein's theory of relativity.

It's an equation that gives us kind of an outline for how to frame the problem.