Once Again, Astrobiologists Put a Veneer of Sophistication on Ignorance

People who follow SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, likely know about the Drake equation. It was the brainchild of one of the founding fathers of SETI, Frank Drake. In order to estimate the probable number of other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, he wrote his famous equation as the product of a series of factors, such as the number of stars, those with planets in the habitable zone, those on which life emerges, the fraction of those who evolve intelligent life, an...