Alone: A new look at the Drake Equation Paperback – November 14, 2024

In the early 1960s, the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began and a mannamed Frank Drake proposed his now famous Drake equation as a way to determine if there were aliens out there. With this equation, Drake estimated there were between 1000 and 100,000,000 planets with intelligent civilizations among the 100-200 billion stars in the Milky Way. Despite 60 years of searching, though, SETI has not found any evidence of extraterrestrial life, intelligent or not.The big recent excitement has been the launching of two telescopes—Hubble in 1990 and James Webb in 2022—has since sparked excitement across the globe. Over 5000+ new exoplanets have been discovered from these two telescopes alone, some in the habitable zone, and one with water. At the time that Drake wrote his equation, he did not know if our suns planets were an anomaly. He certainly did not know their type, consistency, and location. Now that our new telescopes are finding this exoplanet information, let us improve upon Drake’s equation by adding a few more terms to his equation, like Sun Type, Planet Type and Location in the habitable zone. We will then try to scientifically estimate numbers for them the best we can, and from this produce what we hope is an improved Drake number.The truth of why we are alone might surprise you. Read more