Frank Drake and the Drake Equation – between 1000 to 100 million intelligent species

100 million! Far from the 8 original races or the 57 claimed by Clifford Stone. Wow!

Frank Drake, the author of the famed “Drake Equation,” which estimates the possible range of intelligent civilizations in our home Milky Way Galaxy, which contains about 400 billion stars will be giving a talk on Thursday, March 31, at the Alaska’s Barrow Arctic Science Consortium on “new habitable planets in space, and our new searches for the inhabitants.”

“One of the greatest developments in the history of astronomy,” Drake has written recently, “has been the detection, in only a few years, of more than 200 other planetary systems. Furthermore, our vision of the variety of inhabitable planets has greatly broadened – the prospects for there being many planets inhabited by intelligent creatures have greatly expanded.

“Our best estimate is that there are somewhere between 1,000 and 100 million advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way,” he wrote in his book, “Is Anyone Out There?”

“The values for the various factors in the equation have changed over the years, but this answer remains the most probable range,” he said.

(Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com)