The Drake Equation is entirely arbitrary and its parameters can run from millions to zero. You can do what this guy is doing and make it say whatever you want it to say. Does that sound like science to you? If it cannot come up with a testable hypothesis it isn't science and the Drake Equation can mean anything and if a hypothesis can literally mean anything it means nothing. Many of the Equation's parameters cannot be known like how many planets choose to communicate are there? It is merely a guess and don't be fooled a guess in this field is simply prejudice. As far as Drake or Lex Fridman knows is just their bias and prejudice. No science to be found here.<br><br> I'm a bio-engineer (retired) and when the Drake Equation and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence or SETI came out in 1960 with the young astrophysicist's Frank Drake's Equation it was widely received by astronomers and cosmologists. Problem was and still is is that it is a biologist's field of expertise and they were SETI's biggest and I might add harshest critics. Harvard's biologist George Gaylord Simpson said it was a field with nothing to study and it still is. SETI is a religion, it doesn't have any evidence whatsoever to back it up, it is wishful thinking. <br><br>You won't hear a biologist or synthetic chemist say the things that astronomers and astrophysicists claim about extra-terrestrial life. Only Carbon could manufacture life, there isn't anything else in the Universe that can make the necessary amount of chemical bonds for life. Only carbon can make the thousands, yes thousands of combinations contained in the simplest cell that just appeared on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. A cyanobacteria that started photosynthesis thus beginning the Earth's oxygen cycle. Astrobiology is a field of nothing, but speculation. <br><br>I and many other honest biologists think that any life found on Mars will contain Earth DNA because it came from here from a meteor comet collision blasting some of Earth's life to Mars, just like we find Mars rocks on Earth. As far as we know not only is carbon needed for life, but water is too, but there is some speculation that possibly some other solvent besides water could start life off, but most likely it has to be water, it was here. Now of course some say life came here from Mars instead, the old directed panspermia theory. It was started by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's double helix. Crick saw that life was too complicated to have just formed by itself here on Earth so he put it off to another planet, but he never explained how it managed to form itself on another planet either.