Are We Alone In The Galaxy? Updated Drake Equation Suggests We Might Be

[Maxmars]

https://www.iflscience.com/are-we-alone-...t-be-74438

The Fermi Paradox is not a paradox at all in my opinion because the distances between the stars have not been understood well as it seems. With conventional means interstellar travel is impossible. Even if we assume some civilizations are technologically advanced that doesn't imply they could make contact or be able to find us.

There is also the problem of synchronicity. Civilizations don't last forever and advanced civilizations may have existed in the past, let's say hundreds of millions of year ago, but they have now gone. They are extinct. These civilizations will never be able to find us and vice versa as we live through different eras.

The other problem is self-destruction and we could argue that intelligent civilizations are destroyed before reaching sufficient advancement to make contact and this is another factor we need to consider.

The probability we are the only ones in the Galaxy is miniscule. The ingredients needed for life are the same everywhere and in very large quantities. Consider our Galaxy, the Milky Way, that contains at least 100 billion stars and as many at least as many planets. The Universe is an area that contains up to 2,000 million Galaxies which on average contain around 100 billion stars...

The numbers are huge and the most likely scenario is that life is present and was present everywhere. The problem is elsewhere and it has to do with the distances, the era in which civilizations exist, extinctions before reaching very advanced civilization levels, and the speed at which radio signals are travelling.

Unless some civilizations have already found the means to manage interstellar travel. Non conventional of course.

I have always been a sort of closet dissenter about both the Fermi, and Drake equations.  It's not that I disagree with their approach to 'modeling' reality.  It's just that - as modern notions have recently proven - you can't expect to be able to attribute all the details of reality within your model.  There are a lot of presumptions, which seem all perfectly  reasonable, but that does not mean they include everything.  Everything is that 'thing' which we don't know.  

So new information, new analyses, and new thought processes should be expected to, if not supersede the old model, at least "inform it."  

The article was good, but I failed to detect "what" they "changed" which makes them opine the formula might have been wrong.  And the title kind of disappointed me too.  In the days of those scientists, "formulas: and "equations" were not haphazardly selected to stand out.  This was a solid piece of mathematical work by a thinker of great reputation. 

Nevertheless, it is a model only. Capable only of considering what we can conceive to quantify. Those things are always to be defeated by what we don't know.

I think it extremely unlikely that "we are alone."  You don't "need" to be a technologically "communicative" species to exist.  Consider more primitive life, consider life which may employ technologies which we can't detect or recognize?  There will be life, somewhere.