You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

FrameBenignly comments on [link] On the abundance of extraterrestrial life after the Kepler mission - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 05 December 2014 09:02PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (25)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: FrameBenignly 07 December 2014 08:30:34PM 0 points [-]

We may not have good measures for estimating Fb or Lb let alone Lc, but the Kepler mission gives us a pretty good estimate of Rb. You should update your estimate of the closeness of a biotic planet depending on whether your Rb prior was higher or lower than the result.

Comment author: Eniac 07 December 2014 11:43:03PM 0 points [-]

That is true. However, if "any value could be assigned to Fb", then any value can be made to come out of the Drake equation, except for an upper bound. Updating on Rb can shift around that upper bound, but it tells you nothing about the really small values that decide whether we are alone in the universe or not.