60 years later, is it time to update the Drake equation?
I don&#x27;t have any philosophic objections to the existence of extraterrestrial life, but what does bug me is when people claim that simply because the universe is so big, that somehow makes it not only likely but practically certain that life has developed on other planets or in other solar systems or galaxies.  That kind of thinking presumes some very important information that we just don&#x27;t have.  We are currently unable to enter any coherent value into the portion of the Drake Equation that pertains to how frequently life arises from non-life.<p>We have an admittedly very limited knowledge of events outside of our own planet, but so far as we know, abiogenesis has occurred only once, and from that one event, all life on Earth proceeded. (It&#x27;s possible that abiogenesis occurred independently multiple times during the beginning of life on Earth, but I don&#x27;t think we yet have a compelling argument that it must have happened more than once.)<p>My favorite analogy:<p>Suppose you see a number with this pattern:<p>0.1001000101001000101001000___<p>What would you say is the likelihood that a 1 is the next number in the sequence?  Not that hard to compute a probability, is it?<p>But suppose you see a number with this pattern:<p>0.1000000000000000000000000___<p>What is the likelihood that a 1 is the next number in the sequence? You could say the odds are 1-in-25, but that doesn&#x27;t takes into account the clear pattern we see in the sequence. Unless and until we start to see some more ones pop up, it&#x27;s reasonable to assume that this is a sequence of infinite zeroes, or at the very least that it could perfectly well be a sequence of infinite zeroes. Suppose the sequence goes on for many trillions of numerals. No one&#x27;s going to say, &quot;Well, if there are trillions of 0s, it&#x27;s highly unlikely that there won&#x27;t be some 1s sprinkled in there somewhere.&quot;