We’re All Going to Die

A friend posted a message on my facebook page today, a message of doom, a message that we are messing up the planet perhaps beyond repair, that we are about to trigger a mass-extinction event, which would be much  worse than the mass-extinction event that killed the dinosaurs because this time one of the honored extinctees would  be us.

It’s the End of the World As We Know It

Then a horrible thought struck me.  It’s about the Drake Equation, which is usually thought of, incorrectly, as the Sagan Equation, because people attribute all sorts of stuff to Sagan,  Einstein, Shakespeare,  Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde that they never said, just because they are people who are famous for saying stuff.

The Drake equation is:

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);

and

R^* = the average number of star formation per year in our galaxy

f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_l = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point

f_i = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)

f_c = 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

Anyway, my thought was that  there needs to be another number in there, somewhere betwen fi  and L, probably  just after fc,  which is, coincidentally, where we find ourselves today.  That number would be fcnsfs , and fcnsfs = fraction of civilizations that are not so fucking stupid they blow themselves to smithereens or poison their atmosphere because once technology has been invented, it invariably reaches a point where it is beyond the control of the species which invented it.

Maybe that’s why we have no real evidence of any extraterrestrials visiting Earth.  Maybe it’s just really, really rare to survive this stage, or maybe it never, ever happens, it would be like exceeding the speed of light or something. 

Maybe we are doomed after all.