#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

2732.776 - 2756.072 Adam Frank

What's so brilliant about the Drake equation is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are out there into a bunch of sub-problems. And he breaks it into seven sub-problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with. So the first term is the rate at which stars form.