I Built a Stable Planetary System with 416 Planets in the Habitable Zone

When Frank Drake was a boy, growing up in 1930s Chicago, his parents, observant Baptists, enrolled him in Sunday School. By the time he was 8 years old, he suspected his religion, and others around the world, were, to some extent, environmentally determined—local chance events helped shape them. He began to think the same might be true of civilization, for humans and, perhaps, aliens as well—but he thought it better to keep these thoughts to himself.

But not for long: He would go on to found S.E.T.I., the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and laid out a simple way to estimate the number of civilizations within our galaxy that we could hope to listen-in on. It’s an equation that looks like this:

N (the number of communicable civilizations in the Milky Way)

  = R (the rate at which stars form)

  × N (the fraction of stars with Earth-sized planets on Earth-like orbits)