The Search for Life: The Drake Equation (TV Movie 2010)

The Search for Life: The Drake Equation: Directed by Tim Usborne. With Dallas Campbell, Frank Drake, Jill Tarter, Paul Davies. A look at the Drake equation, developed by Dr. Frank Drake as a way to think about the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy that could exist and communicate with us.

“I think there was too much focus on the equation and too little on the filters. The physical factors arenu0026#39;t really that important–the product of the physical terms will no doubt end up somewhere within a few orders of magnitude of 1. The prevalence of ETs clearly comes down to the biological factors and the filters he was talking about. Unfortunately, I do not feel he handled this well at all.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe thing is, there arenu0026#39;t three filters, there are four. He touched on the L parameter but only in reference to external threats. The really scary threat is internal–there are many ways we could do ourselves in and weu0026#39;ve already had multiple close calls. We might not see any ETs out there because L is always very short.”