“I found I could reduce the whole agenda for the meeting to a single line [the Drake equation]. Of course, I didn’t have real values for most of the factors. But I did have a compelling equation that summarized the topics to be discussed… Sometimes people… think the equation is highly speculative. In fact, it is just the opposite, since each phenomenon it assumes to take place in the universe is an event that has already taken place at least once.”
Astronomer, Principal founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
