Back when we were married, I used to get into arguments with Darlene about science. Just friendly debates. Nothing serious. Although some people tend to take science seriously.
My stance was, science is a never-ending search for the truth based on verifiable observations, as well as being an easy way to earn money.
Darlene saw things differently. To her, science was a politics-driven house of cards, just waiting to come crashing down.
Over dinner one night, she brought up Frank Drake, whom I had never heard of… a young astrophysicist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. In 1960, Drake ran a two-week project called ‘Ozma’, to search for extraterrestrial signals, and found nothing. But for some reason, the scientific world got really excited about the possibility of locating extraterrestrial civilizations.
That same year, Drake organized the first SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) conference and presented his famous Drake Equation:
N = R∗ ⋅ fp ⋅ ne ⋅ fl ⋅ fi ⋅ fc ⋅ L
- N = the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with which communication might be possible.
and
- R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy.
- fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets.
- ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.
- fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.
- fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).
- fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
- L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Obviously, Frank Drake had thought quite a bit about this question of alien civilizations, to be able to come up with a complicated scientific equation.
But as Darlene pointed out (bless her skeptical little heart) earthbound science does not have the slightest idea what numbers to plug into most of these variables. Like, what fraction of planets can support life? We didn’t see great results here in our own solar system. The only planet that claims to harbor intelligent civilizations is the planet Earth, and that civilization (if we can really call it that) has been able to send intelligent radio signals (if that’s a sign of intelligence) for the past 100 years. So out of 4.5 billion years, our planet could conceivably be noticed by an alien civilization (and probably avoided purposely, as a result) for 0.00000002 percent of its existence.
Our planet’s most successful species — insects — have been around for 480 million years and still haven’t (to our knowledge) shown any interest in contacting alien civilizations. A lot of time wasted.
The only earth-bound species that’s shown any interest in extraterrestrial contact is us. And Darlene argued that we’re already on the road to ruin, thanks in part to science.
Add the other planets in our solar system into the equation — from which no one has heard a peep — and you can calculate our chance that any given planet would send a radio signal to us, on any given Sunday, is like one-in-a-gazillion.
Simply stated, the Drake Equation looks perfectly scientific, but it’s actually meaningless. Like so many other “scientific equations”.
Darlene’s main argument for her “house of cards” theory is that — ever since scientists realized they could write up a meaningless equation and get the scientific community excited — they’ve spent a lot of their time doing exactly that, because no one bothers to notice that we don’t have any real numbers to plug into the equation.
The biggest house of cards, Darlene argued (regularly), was the Climate Change “house of cards”. The Drake Equation has seven factors, most of which we have no numbers for. The Climate Change Equation has 100 or more factors, most of which we have no numbers for. Like, we know roughly how many cows we have… but we don’t know how often they burp or fart methane.
As you can understand, Darlene sort of blames Frank Drake for the decline of scientific truth… and for the embrace, by scientists, of meaningless equations.
After the divorce, I looked around and discovered that Darlene had taken all the playing cards.
That’s when I started to suspect she was actually a scientist.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.