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warrreagle...that's a pretty interesting formula...I heard of a similar formula from a reknowned astronomer that came to speak at our highschool, for all I know it could be the same guy. He created an equation to find ballpark how many intelligent life forms were in the universe...with things like stars, orbits, temperatures, and many other variables, and he used fairly conservative values that most astronomers could agree on. One important variable that he left open to interpretation was time that intelligent civilizations lasted. For the cynics that thought the world was going to end soon, he plugged in a number like 50,000 years, and the answer came out to exactly 1. Granted, he probably had time to find out the best mix of conservative values that came out to 1, but still, pretty interesting. Then, assuming the human race may last longer, he plugged in a number like 1 million, and the number of intelligent civilizations became hundreds of thousands. From there, he proposed that if most intelligent civilizations last a million years, and we have only lasted around 50,000, we are most certainly one of the dumbest. So either we are the smartest and we are alone, or we are the dumbest and are not alone. I'm sure his theory is not without flaw, but I found it pretty intriguing.
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