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Defense Intelligence Reference Document An Introduction To The Statistical Drake Equation

Defense Intelligence Agency · 55 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

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I 1. Introduction I
I
2. Step 1: Letting each factor become a random
2.1. Step 2: Introducing logs to change the product into a I
2.2. Step 3: The transformation law of random variab1es. I
I
3. Step 4: Assuming the easiest input distribution for
each D,: the uniform distribution.
3.1. Step 5: A numerical example of the Statistical Drake equation
with uniform distributions for the Drake random
variables D,.
I
3.2. Step 6: Computing the logs of the
7 uniform1y distributed
Drake random variables
D,.
3.3. Step 7: Finding the probability
density function of N, but
only numerically not
analytica11y.
I DEAD END! I 4. The Central Limit Theorem (CL T) of Statistics.
,. LDGNDRMAL distribution as the probability
distribution of the number N of
communicating ExtraTerrestrial Civilizations
in the Galaxy,
•- Comparing the CL T results with the Non-CLT
results, and discarding the Non-CLT approach.
,. DISTANCE to the nearest ExtraTerrestrial
Civilization as a probability distribution (Paul
Davies dubbed that the Maccone distribution).
,., Classical, non-probabilistic derivation of the
Distance to the nearest ET Civilization.
,., Probabilistic derivation of probability density
function for nearest ET Civilization Distance.
I
,., Statistical properties of the distribution.
,.• Numerical example of the distribution.
,. DATA ENRICHMENT PRINCIPLE as the best
CL T consequence upon the Drake equation:
i!..!11". number of factors allowed for.
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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.