The Search for Life: The Drake Equation

[Alien8]

Just in case you like this sort of thing: Why haven't we found aliens yet?

The Search for Life: The Drake Equation is on BBC Four, Tuesday 14 December, 2000 GMT and then afterwards on iPlayer.

 

[ASC1951]

Well, as one who does like this sort of thing, I was vaguely disappointed. The Beeb advertised it as New Programme, but I am sure I had seen bid chunks of it before, e.g. earlier stages of the same research from Mono Lake.

I suppose there will be arguments that money spent on SETI could be better spent on half a hospital. I don't agree - it's peanuts in the great scheme of things, probably a fraction of the world's daily spend on cosmetics. Personally, I'm sure that that life is widespread throughout our galaxy and intelligent life fairly common. Anything else just seems so staggeringly unlikely.

 

[Night Train]

I had a sense of dejavu and so went off for a shower and left it to record.

Watching 'Beautiful Equations' instead.

 

[MacB]

Yeah, I found it a bit disappointing as well, very slow paced, as I find with many documentaries nowadays. They seem to want to turn everything into docudramas and place style over content. This one wasn't so bad the style didn't jar too much with me but it imparted little that was new and did so very slowly. I thought it did the perspective thing quite well though especially around the timescale windows. I always find it a little depressing when they look at the possibility that intelligent life is plentiful but self destructive, maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part. I think the scale gets to me as well when they look at time, distance and numbers, it makes me feel all insignificant.

 

[TVC]

I had a sense of dejavu and so went off for a shower and left it to record.

Watching 'Beautiful Equations' instead.

I gave up on that, half an hour in and nothing had been said, then he started to compare the whole thing to cubism.... forget it.

 

[661-Pete]

I've little time for the Drake 'equation', I'm afraid - the closest thing to mathematical waffle and b***sh** there is. Anyway it's not really very advanced maths, merely multiplying together a collection of wild guesstimates.

Turning to the 'Beautiful Equations', well you've got to understand that this is an artist's perception of scientific wonders, so the programme was bound to tell you nothing about the underlying science. Does that matter? Certainly anyone who's actually studying the science wouldn't need the scientific stuff on TV. A pity that the "E=Mc[sup]2[/sup]" professor didn't actually get as far as explaining relativity.

And to include the Dirac equation - a pretty bold move seeing as no-one other than a physicist could have the least understanding of what any part of it was about - as the boffin made clear! I vaguely remember doing it in Physics, its expanded form:


which emphasises its inscrutability, methinks...

 

[MacB]

I've little time for the Drake 'equation', I'm afraid - the closest thing to mathematical waffle and b***sh** there is. Anyway it's not really very advanced maths, merely multiplying together a collection of wild guesstimates.

With so many unknowns it's bound to be like that but its strength is the fact that it's not advanced maths and is therefore quite easy for people to comprehend. More importantly it's easy to manipulate as more information becomes available, like recent ideas around there being more stars than previously thought. I'd actually say that, until the unknown variables are greatly reduced, there's no point in trying to develop a more advanced formula. Plugging in the variables is the fun part, it can be done using variables reached via esoteric calculations or just plucked out of the air.

The quote I did enjoy was from Clarke - Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is staggering.

 

[Ravenbait]

Frood puts science programmes on telly when he wants to annoy me. He likes seeing me froth at the mouth when drama and "human interest" triumph over the science.

The worst one recently was a documentary about Cretaceous period fossils. It provided such memorable phrases as "I call them air-borne death rocks" and "think of it as a killer banana".

What I really don't understand is the current fashion for putting everything, including prehistory, in the present tense. I think it's similar to the style guides that insist everything has to be written in the active rather than passive form. Suggesting that T. Rex is charging around the shrubberies of downtown Denver isn't more dramatic, it's just plain silly.

Sam

 

[marinyork]

Turning to the 'Beautiful Equations', well you've got to understand that this is an artist's perception of scientific wonders, so the programme was bound to tell you nothing about the underlying science. Does that matter? Certainly anyone who's actually studying the science wouldn't need the scientific stuff on TV. A pity that the "E=Mc[sup]2[/sup]" professor didn't actually get as far as explaining relativity.

I thought they did actually make a job at explaining relativity. It might not have dedicated a great deal of time to it, but Arthur Miller did make a perfectly good attempt in the seconds allotted to him. Arthur Miller can write, he's done pieces on the art/beauty topic before in books.

Despite it's severe limitations and and on quite a few levels being pretty bad (Alan Davies's attempts at similar subject matter worked much better) I did sort of enjoy it. Matt Collings expressed a view I've heard a lot of times, but seemed a lot less argumentative about it. I was surprised by some of the choices though I thought they'd make a bee-line for other areas of Maths and they didn't at all. I don't know whether this is that Matt Collings didn't talk to enough people or the producers told him to stay off certain areas. I feel it a shame, I think he would have enjoyed it.

And to include the Dirac equation - a pretty bold move seeing as no-one other than a physicist could have the least understanding of what any part of it was about - as the boffin made clear! I vaguely remember doing it in Physics, its expanded form:

Pete , please don't exaggerate.

 

[661-Pete]

Pete , please don't exaggerate.

Ah well you have the advantage of me!

I was looking out to see if they'd put up that qp-pq=iħ equation, which I also vaguely remember from student days, but sadly no! I'm sure any artist would have appreciated its beauty and symmetry...

 

[marinyork]

Ah well you have the advantage of me!

I was looking out to see if they'd put up that qp-pq=iħ equation, which I also vaguely remember from student days, but sadly no! I'm sure any artist would have appreciated its beauty and symmetry...

I would say so as well. I think many commutators/Lie Groups/Lie Algebras show beauty. Then again through Emily Noether's two theorems out pops all kinds of beautiful equations in the form of continuity equations.