Personally, I find these miss one of the key points.<p>Today, we can kill everyone off with an exchange of the already existing nuclear weapon inventory. But that requires a reasonably large number of people to make mistakes or take action.<p>We're in the process of killing everyone off by screwing up the natural climate process which requires a large number of people to commit to inaction.<p>Within this century we will have the means and the understanding for a single individual to craft a DNA based pathogen that can infect and kill nearly everyone on the planet.<p>These are the three tests for graduation into the club of "long lived intelligent species." Fail any one of them and you don't make it. I call them:<p><pre><code> * Action of the group
* Inaction of the group
* Action of the individual
</code></pre>
We apparently passed test 1, we're not doing so well on test 2, and we'll have to be a lot better at eradicating hate in individuals if we want to have a hope of passing test #3.
Michael Crichton tears up the Drake Equation (and SETI) pretty thoroughly in his speech entitled Aliens Cause Global Warming.<p><a href="http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers...</a><p>"...the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested..."<p>-Crichton
One in 10^24 seems like really easy odds to beat. Basically anything should happen more often than that, right? But if we choose a random 17 letters of the alphabet, the odds that they spell "probabilistically" is less than that. If we gave 17 letters to each of the 10^24 planets, we expect the word to happen on only one star (actually less than one). It's not too hard to argue that life is more difficult to get by random chance than the word "probabilistically."<p>So before taking this article to mean that life is actually pretty likely, consider that an event having to occur at least one in 10^24 odds is actually extremely difficult for complex probabilistic phenomena. Who knows how likely life is, but we can't just assume it's higher than one in 10^24.
> We find that as long as the probability that a habitable zone planet develops a technological species is larger than ∼10^−24, humanity is not the only time technological intelligence has evolved.<p>I wonder how they turn a statement based on a probability into a statement that is an absolute truth (no probabilities involved).
TFA has the same problem the Drake equation has in general. We lack the insight to judge whether -24 is a reasonable exponent. Why shouldn't it be -35, or any other number?
The universe is a really inconceivably big place. In fact they (the smart people) are not entirely sure that it isn't infinite.<p>Drake equation or not, seems such a big place that it seems hard to imagine that this tiny little spot is in some way unique.