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White to move and mate in two #515 - the Drake Equation [1]

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Date: 2024-05-28  

Happy Birthday to Frank Drake (May 28, 1930 – September 2, 2022), astrophysicist, astrobiologist and creator of the famous Drake equation, which is used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.

The 'educated guesses' used by Drake and his colleagues in 1961 were:

R∗ = 1 (1 star formed per year, on the average over the life of the galaxy; this was regarded as conservative)

fp = 0.2 to 0.5 (one fifth to one half of all stars formed will have planets)

ne = 1 to 5 (stars with planets will have between 1 and 5 planets capable of developing life)

fl = 1 (100% of these planets will develop life)

fi = 1 (100% of which will develop intelligent life)

fc = 0.1 to 0.2 (10–20% of which will be able to communicate)

L = somewhere between 1000 and 100,000,000 years

Inserting the above minimum numbers into the equation gives a minimum N of 20. Inserting the maximum numbers gives a maximum of 50,000,000. Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 planets with civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. en.wikipedia.org/...

At the conference, we plugged in our best estimates for each of the factors, and found that the product of the first six factors on the right hand side came out to roughly the value of 1. Thus the value of N seemed to hinge solely on the value of L — how long intelligent, communicative civilizations could survive. At the end of the meeting, Struve offered a toast: “To the value of L. May it prove to be a very large number.”

www.seti.org/... So, the question remains — why have we not found extraterrestrial civilizations yet or even signs of any life? Is L too small, as may well be for our civilization? Now let’s ponder over today’s puzzle composed in 1930 by noted British Chess composer Brian Harley (1883-1955). He was the president of the British Chess Problem Society from 1947 until 1949. In his honour, each year the British magazine "The Problemist" awards the best two-mover problem with the "Brian Harley" award. P.S.

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