What is Out There?
This week’s meeting of the Year 11 Colloquium, led by Mr Hindocha, focused on the question of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy. Having considered a definition of intelligent life, the students were introduced to the famous Drake Equation — a probabilistic argument attempting to determine how many such intelligent, communicative systems there might be.
This year, Mr Hindocha split the group into three, taking an optimistic, moderate, and pessimistic view in terms of the data they entered into the equation. The results certainly reflected the division!
Overall, this year’s group were more sceptical than their predecessors about what might be out there, but, as Mr Cavendish pointed out, our visit to the National Space Centre in Leicester, with its focus on the James Webb Telescope, will at least give us a better chance of detecting anything!
