How Many Aliens Are in the Milky Way? Astronomers Turn to Statistics for Answers – Iqsoft Software Consultants Blog
Summary
In the 12th episode of Cosmos, which aired on December 14, 1980, the program’s co-creator and host Carl Sagan introduced television viewers to astronomer Frank Drake’s eponymous equation. Sagan and others suspected the emergence of life on clement worlds must be a cosmic inevitability, because geologic evidence suggested it arose shockingly quickly on Earth: in excess of four billion years ago, practically as soon as our planet had sufficiently cooled from its fiery formation. “I don’t see any evidence that that’s a safe bet to be making.” Answering questions about the likelihood of abiogenesis and the emergence of intelligence is difficult because scientists just have a single piece of information: life on Earth. “I think what was appealing is that they broke this default, naive interpretation of the early emergence of life.” Even so, Kipping thought the researchers’ work was not without its weaknesses, and he has now sought to correct it with a more elaborate Bayesian analysis of his own. Combining the Jeffreys prior with the sparse evidence of the emergence and intelligence of life on Earth, Kipping obtained a posterior probability distribution, which allowed him to calculate new odds for the four corners.
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