It may be popularly named 'The Drake Equation', but the attribution goes to Frank Drake, so it's Drake's Equation, right? ;) The flaw in Fermi's Paradox is the assumption that interstellar (let alone intergalactic) travel is linear or even exponential. It is worse than exponential. It also underestimates the problems of transporting life across the great voids of space (radiation, gravity, micrometeors, and so on). Let's put some facts on the table to illustrate the point: 1. The trip from Earth to the Moon takes 3 days. This is the nearest extraterrestrial (natural) object in the universe for us and, fortunately, one that orbits Earth relatively close. 2. The trip from Earth to Mars takes 6 months (and only under proper orbital configurations). This is the nearest extraterrestrial planet within our solar system (if Venus is nearer, it is currently too hostile for human venture). - Note the difference already between 3 days (72 hours) and 6 months (4320 hours) - we're not even to the edge of the solar system proper yet! - 3. The trip from Earth to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.2 light years! Unless some uber-Einstein crushes General Relativity, there is no way for a humaned spacecraft to attain even a significant percentage of light speed, therefore it would take something like (let's guess 50% c) 8.4 years to reach. Not impossible, but it would require several innovations, either stasis or a fully functional life-sustaining habitat (air, water, plants, animals, food, artificial gravity, automated repair systems, materials or manufacturing of raw materials, and so forth). Such an endeavor would take quadrillions of dollars (i.e.: the entire human population and governments working in unison and foregoing GNPs and such). 4. The trip to the nearest galaxy (M31 Andromeda) would take 2,000,000 light years!!!!!!!! (need more exclamations). This is beyond the life expectancy of any living organism of Earth by a factor of 1000 and most species reach extinction within this timespan. This distance may be center to center, but even taking edge star (which ours happens to be) to edge star, it would still be around 1,900,000 light years. That gulf is insurmountable without discoveries in Physics that would aid in circumventing General Relativity. No living organism on any planet in the universe could bridge intergalactic gulfs without nearly deity-level technology. It wouldn't take 50 million years, it would take a miracle! Warp-drives and subspace may all sound within technological possibilities, but they require General Relativity to be superceded or circumvented. No such luck in the 100 years since Einstein published. I don't agree with Dyson (though I haven't read what this wrinkle is). The resolution of information decreases with distance. The most distant objects in the universe that we can 'see' only impinge a photon here and there. Intelligent life hundreds of thousands, millions, or trillions of light years away would be impossible for our current technology to distinguish against all natural 'noise'. The signal would need to be strong, unusually coherent, and pin-point directed (this is why Laser-SETI has merit). The problem is that the probability of a laser point impinging on our planet, for instance, considering scattering galactic dust, gravitation deflection (stars, black holes), and simple occlusion are, you guessed it, astronomical! ;0)

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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