A Data-Driven Look at Alien Civilizations (Part 1 of the Drake Equation Series)
What if I told you there might be over 2,000 alien civilizations currently in the Milky Way galaxy? Sounds like a plot twist from your favorite sci-fi show, right? But what if I said we could use data science to get closer to an answer? That’s exactly what we’ll be doing in this series, using real numbers to estimate how many alien civilizations might exist, how close they could be, and whether we have any chance of ever contacting them.
In this series, we’ll be working through the Drake Equation, which has been the go-to tool for scientists since the 1960s when it comes to estimating how many advanced alien civilizations are out there. We’ll be spicing things up with modern data science techniques like Monte Carlo simulations, which are essentially fancy ways of saying, “Let’s run the numbers thousands of times and see what happens.”
In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?” The universe is unimaginably vast, with billions of stars just in our galaxy, and each of these stars likely has planets. So why haven’t we met any aliens yet? That’s the Fermi Paradox — the contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence for or contact with any alien civilizations.
To help solve this puzzle, Frank Drake came up with the Drake Equation in 1961. It’s a way of breaking down the problem into smaller steps, asking questions like: “How many stars are there? How many have planets? How many of those planets could support life?” Each of these questions narrows down the search, and at the end, we get a number that tells us how many civilizations might be out there, sending signals into space.