How many Morks and where?

Of course the title of the essay was the draw: How Many Aliens Are in the Milky Way? Astronomers Turn to Statistics for Answers.

Wouldn't you also be interested?

An even bigger draw was the author's name: Anil Ananthaswamy.

I knew I have blogged his essay and referred to the shared heritage behind that name; it was 3 years ago, in June 2017, where I noted this:

First, the author of the essay, from where I excerpted those two sentences, has a name that is easily recognizable as a distinctly Tamil name--for those of us from that part of the old country.  Anil Ananthaswamy.  So, of course, I had to check that first:

He studied electronics and electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, and the University of Washington, Seattle, and trained as a journalist at the University of California, Santa Cruz 

He is now a journalist/science writer, operating from Bangalore and Berkeley!  I suppose there are quite a few of us who mistakenly wandered into engineering programs!

Ananthaswamy covers interesting territory through science and, as I wrote then, "way beyond my technical abilities."  This essay on aliens in the Milky Way is also filled with scientific information that was sometimes difficult to handle.  But, hey, if I want my students to work through difficult topics, well, I ought to practice what I preach.  Practice I did.

Sure, there are billions and billions of stars out there.  If luck has it, I might even view with my own eyes a comet that will not come around for another 6,800 years.  But, "the probability that life would ever get started—that you would make that leap from chemistry to life, even given suitable conditions," is a difficult one to estimate.

So, how many aliens are out there in the Milky Way?  There is no bottom-line answer to that question.  Ananthaswamy tricked me into reading the essay, which turned out to be a discussion of how Bayesian statistics is applied to this challenging question!

Whether it is scientists or the religious, and even the non-scientist seculars like me, we are all fascinated with questions on where life came from, and whether life-especially intelligent life--exists elsewhere in the universe.

I wonder if humans--or some future form of homo sapiens--will have cracked the mystery by the time Comet Neowise returns.