How many intelligent civilizations exist throughout the universe? That’s the question that the famous Drake Equation was created to answer. Devised by astrophysicist Frank Drake in 1961, the Drake Equation uses parameters like rate of star formation, number of planets per star, and length of time a civilization could have been beaming information out into space to try and find a probabilistic estimate for just how not-alone we are in the cosmos.
Now, a new study—published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society—aims to take that idea one step further with a probabilistic equation that is essentially the Drake Equation 2.0. But it’s doing things a bit different—it’s using the driving conditions that control our universe to extrapolate the odds of intelligent life instead of just looking at the results that those conditions have already borne out.
And it’s not stopping there. This team pushed out into the hypothetical multiverse with their equation to try and see what universal conditions would be best for intelligent life. Spoiler alert: it’s not ours.
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