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from Part III - Planetary Systems and Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
Here, I ask the question: how many planets are there with life in the Milky Way? This question has many variants. We can ask about simple microbial life. Alternatively, we may ask about more complex life – for example multicellular animals and plants. Then again, we may ask specifically about intelligent life. An approach that can be used for all of these variants is the one pioneered by the American astronomer Frank Drake. In this chapter, I use the Drake equation to estimate the number of microbial worlds and the number of worlds with animals. (In a later chapter I use the same approach to estimate the number of worlds with intelligent life.) When Drake first devised his equation, we were hard put to come up with meaningful numerical values for any of its parameters. Now we have reasonably good values for at least some of them. Hence our estimates are better than before. However, there are still wide errors, so I investigate the effects of these errors on our estimates. Bearing them in mind, I only attempt estimates to the nearest order of magnitude. These estimates are: 1 billion planets with microbial life; and 10 million planets with animal life.
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