Fifty years ago, Frank Drake wrote an equation aimed at estimating the number of technological civilizations existing at any one time in the galaxy. It has become the foundational equation of SETI.
Now, Sara Seager of MIT has written an equation estimating the odds of finding life-- any life-- on a planet orbiting an M-class star, the most common type of star in the galaxy. Advances made the last twenty years in finding exoplanets, and advances on the horizon, she argues, makes such a calculation reasonable. Seager says there's a remote chance of finding life elsewhere within a decade.
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