>Although I understand your desire for clarification, Jim, and must admit
>that your interpretation puts a different spin on the equation, I maintain
>that it's not for us to modify Frank's equation as long as he's alive and
>kicking! I'd argue strongly for following his interpretation, until he
>sees fit to change it, or coming up with an entirely different equation if
>it's something different we wish to estimate. In either case, remember
>that such equations serve only to quantify our ignorance.
Paul:
Your own recent post shows the spin that the www.seti-inst.edu/drake-eq.html
website put on the Drake Equation. If that "spin" hadn't been there, my
comments would not have been prompted. That is, you wrote:
>That page defines N as:
>"The number of communicative civilizations" (Drake's original definition)
>and then further clarifies it with:
>"The number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose radio emissions
>are detectable."
I was merely pointing out that this latter "clarification" easily allows N
to be over three orders of magnitude too small. Drake's original definition,
above, was better, since it doesn't explicitly limit communications to a
20th-century method. So why wouldn't it be logical for the seti-inst
webmaster to eliminate the gross error introduced by this "spin"?
However, even Drake's original definition is deficient in not allowing for
the likelihood that ETI in our vicinity and aware of us would be
purposefully non-communicative, at least overtly. This would merely be one
corrolary of a Codex Galactica by which they may be abiding, as per Newman &
Sagan in 1981, and in keeping with a strategy of treating a society at our
level of technological adolescence with delicacy (Sagan & Newman, 1983).
Jim Deardorff