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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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References
[1] Benford, Gregory, Jim and Dominic, "Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons: SETI",
arXiv.org web site (22 Oct. 2008).
[2] Carl Sagan, "Cosmos", Random House, New York, 1983. See in particular the pages
298-302.
[3] Bennet, Jeffrey, and Shostak, Seth, "Life in the Universe", second edition, Pearson -
Addison Wesley, San Francisco, 2007. See in particular page 404.
[4] C. Maccone, "The Statistical Drake Equation", paper #IAC-08-A4.1.4 presented on
October 1st, 2008, at the 59 th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) held in
Glasgow, Scotland, UK, September 29 th thru October 3 rd , 2008.
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 55 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.