relying on the Drake Equation is the same kind of error. We’re not interested in the average number of alien civilizations, we’re interested in the distribution of probability over number of alien civilizations. In particular, what is the probability of few-to-none?

SDO solve this with a “synthetic point estimate” model, where they choose random points from the distribution of possible estimates suggested by the research community, run the simulation a bunch of times, and see how often it returns different values.

A standard Drake Equation multiplying our best estimates for every parameter together yields a probability of less than 1 in a million billion billion billion that we’re alone in our galaxy – making such an observation pretty paradoxical. SDO’s own method, taking account parameter uncertainty into account, yields a probability of 33%.

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