Hello and many thanks for downloading the more or less podcast with me Paul Connolly.

Each week we turn numbers in the news and elsewhere in everyday life upside down.

We give them a good shake and we tally up how much of what tumbles from their pockets is fact and how much is fiction.

Aliens do they exist or are we alone in the universe?

Now, this dog-gared debate has been stirred up of late

by remarkable images and days of being hoovered up and relayed back

to Earth by the James Webb Telescope,

first launched in 2021 and bullishing through the star speckled

expands as a deep space as we speak. It's served as a veritable conveyor belt of

interstellar discovery.

Indeed, in light of these and other revelations, a recent study claims we could have a hundred times

better a shot at finding signs of life than we previously thought.

But we at more or less want well more than just knowing that the odds have improved,

we want to know the numbers.

Yep, if alien life does amount to more than just a fanciable fiction,

then we want the mathematical means to calculate how many of those civilizations there could be,

and if they have either the will, or better still, a way of contacting us.

Now, luckily for overtime budget, somebody has already done the work for us.

I realize for us. I realized what we needed at this point in this meeting was to name all those things that

appeared to be important to the development of

intelligence civilizations. That is Frank Drake, astronomer extraordinary and

creator of the Drake equation, which were about to prod, then

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