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Welcome to the Scientific American Podcast Science Talk posted on February 26, 2014.

I'm Steve Murski.

Earlier today, NASA announced that its Kepler mission had discovered 715 new exoplanets,

orbiting 305 different stars, which immediately made obsolete some of the details of the discussion

you're about to hear with journalist Lee Billings.

Lee is the author of 5 billion years of solitude, The Search for Life Among the Stars.

And even though the specific numbers of exoplanets we now know about is different from when we recently talked,

the larger points remain, well, larger, and on point.

We spoke at Scientific American.

I think a lot of people have heard of the Drake equation, but what was new to me in reading

the book was the story behind the Drake equation.

Basically, he comes up with it in a couple of days before this big conference

he had organized. Tell the story. It's really interesting.

So that's the story that he's told.

Well, first, tell what the Drake equation is for anybody who doesn't know.

Yes. So the Drake equation is something that the radio astronomer Frank Drake came up with really right after his first search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

He was the first guy to really get the notion of pointing a big radio telescope at nearby stars to look for radio transmissions from other cosmic civilizations that might be out there.

...