So given the ludicrous amounts of intelligent beings in the Pact Worlds system (seriously you can't trip without facing a lawsuit from the rock you bashed your shin against) I wanted to present this to at least one of the brave developers to give a best guess and let others have a crack at it to see how hilariously high a number we can come up with. For those curious real scientists for our own galaxy come up with numbers ranging anywhere between 10 to 10 billion civilizations.
N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);
and
R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space
Problem with Drake's equation is that some of those variables (in particular, fl fi and fc) are totally unknown. You have to basically make up stuff to get a number.
So the answer could be anywhere from 1 to to 10 billions. With 1 being us.
Problem with Drake's equation is that some of those variables (in particular, fl fi and fc) are totally unknown. You have to basically make up stuff to get a number.
So the answer could be anywhere from 1 to to 10 billions. With 1 being us.
In our case true. Given the resources in Starfinder? Not so much. Life can exist literally everywhere.
So far, fp and fl both seem to be 1. fi seems to be some number greater than one. Every star has planets (or other bodies capable of having life), everything has life on it (including the stars themselves), and everything has multiple iterations of intelligent life.
ne is definitely greater than 1.
fc seems to be some number close to, but smaller than 1. L seems to be immaterial (because of essentially universal FTL travel).
I would not call L immaterial. Or rather, the spirit of L still matters a lot: "How long a civilization lasts". Because in the Paizoverse, there are a *lot* of things that can kill civilizations dead. I wouldn't be shocked if there is a quite high percentage of star systems with no intelligent life. . . because it all got wiped out by the eldritch horrors existing in the darkness between the stars. Only those systems with active deific defense survive to the point of developing advanced civilization.
And plenty of "lost" civilizations. Dead suns has the Kish which were a pre gap starfaring civilization little more than barbarians in the post gap era.
So L is quite relevant.
The Drake equation is meant to reflect how likely you are to be able to interact with another civilization though. Since there's no light-speed limit, it changes how L affects the equation (for currently existing civilizations), which is what I meant. As long as they can survive for the 6 days needed to get to absalom station and 30 days to get back to their homeworld, you're potentially going to be able to interact with them.
That's assuming they're capable of building the engines. Or did not somehow come to that capability in the years since Triune let it loose but did not receive the message themselves (at least in a way that was comprehensible) indeed one can wonder if Triune's message didn't spark some sort of technological revolution in some species just trying to figure out what the hell the engine is even meant to do.
Right, there are absolutely assumptions there. That was kind of my point, though. There are assumptions about L in the original equation that are different now. We now have to have some thing to modify and/or replace L to have an accurate equation (assuming it can even be accurate in this galaxy).
NE becomes potentially an equation breaker since NE generally only concerns what humans IRL would consider possibility of life formation. But since star type and planet-type in SF doesn't really restrict life, even intelligent humanoid, much less non-humanoid intelligent, the number can be much higher.
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R*: It's probably reasonable to assume that the galaxy that the Pact Worlds are in has a similar R* to the Milky Way (assuming it's not the Milky Way!). Current estimates range from 1.5-3 stars per year. Let's go for the upper bound here, and assume that the Pact Worlds Galaxy has an R* of 3.
fp: As stated up above, most stars in the PWG seem to have planets, and current estimates in our own galaxy bears that out. I see no reason to adjust this down from 1, meaning that all stars in the PWG have planets.
ne: Now we start getting into the fuzzy math. Astronomers are all over the board when it comes to what ne might equal, and within our own solar system we're seriously arguing that at least one of the Jovian moons (most notably Europa) may have had life on it at one point, so unicellular life might be likely within solar systems. Estimates of the total number of Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of Sol-like and red dwarf stars is about 40 billion out of a total 100 billion. Of course, if the Pact Worlds system is anything to judge, then we can throw out the caveats of "habitable zone" or "Earth-like," since life exists on all of the planets in that system, from the one closest to the sun to the one furthest from it. As such, I'd place ne at 100 billion.
fl: Our current best guess for the Milky Way is that fl is high, so if that's the case, then I can't come up with a good reason why the fl of the PWG would be anything but 1.
fi: This is really the crux of the Drake Equation, and the one the beginning of the handwavium. In the Milky Way, we have exactly one planet to point to for the existence of intelligent life (maybe), but it's also the only planet we have confirmed that has life at all. This number could range anywhere from close to 0 to close to 1 in our own galaxy, and scientists have come up with several theories to rationalize whatever number they feel like. In the PWG, though, we have a much larger sample size. Most planets seem to have intelligent life, and all of them within the Pact Worlds certainly do. That's a strong argument for a high fi, and I could entertain an argument of this being 1, but just to hedge our bets and assume that there's some random planet of dinosaurs out there, let's say it's actually 0.95. At some point, the planet rolled a natural 1, and critically failed to establish intelligent life.
fc: This number is likely very low in the Milky Way, but is certainly much higher in the PWG. I'm not prepared to say it's 1, since we probably want the existence of pre-Gap technology worlds. Modern tech worlds are more interesting, so those are probably more likely, which suggests it's probably not half of all possible planets. 0.8 is probably a good guess, though it could be much higher.
L: Actually, this one's pretty easy to guess in the PWG. The Gap is a limiting factor, so the length of time that any civilization could have transmitted signals into space is limited from the end of the Gap until now. The current year is 318 AG, so that's our L.
So, plugging into the Equation, we get:
N = 3 * 1 * 100,000,000,000 * 1 * .95 * .8 * 318 = 72,504,000,000,000 civilizations
And that's just the ones we know about. If fl or fc are higher, then it's more, and we should expect to find new civilizations every year based on these numbers.