Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Agency reference document, dated 11 March 2010, is one of the advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) program. It introduces the Statistical Drake Equation, which replaces each factor of Frank Drake's 1961 equation with a uniform random variable to estimate how far away the nearest extraterrestrial civilization is. In the worked example, there is a 75% probability that the nearest civilization lies between 1,361 and 3,979 light years from Earth.
UNCLASSIFIED//FQA: QFFI&l11J.k W&liii Q•lklf This possibility of ADDING ANY NUMBER OF FACTORS IN THE DRAKE EQUATION (7) was not envisaged, of course, by Frank Drake back in 1961, when "summarizing" the evolution of life in the galaxy in SEVEN simple STEPS. But today, the number of factors in the Drake equation should already be increased: for instance, there is no mention in the original Drake equation of the possibility that asteroidal impacts might destroy the life on Earth at any time, and this is because the demise of the dinosaurs at the K/T impact had not been yet understood by scientists in 1961, and was so only in 1980! In practice, the number of factors should INCREASE as much as necessary in order to get better and better estimates of N as long as our scientific knowledge increases. This is called the "Data Enrichment Principle" and believe should be the next important goal in the study of the statistical Drake equation. Finally, a numerical example explaining how the statistical Drake equation works in the practice will be given in the next section. 14 UNCLASSIFIED/ ;<FQA: 8FFIIIAI!: 1!181!! 8HLY
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 55 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.