Last year I wrote a nine-part series of 'blog posts about the Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox, the Great Filter, and how many civilizations are likely to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy. If you want to re-read it, start here. To give away the ending, after a lot of discussion I would up estimating about 50 space-exploring civilizations in our Galaxy.
Apparently I wasn't the only one who's been thinking about this topic last summer. I just saw an article in Popular Mechanics, dated July 2020, reporting in turn on a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. The authors, Tom Westby and Christopher Conselice, analyzed the likelihood of space-exploring civilizations arising in the Milky Way and came up with a figure of . . . 36.
That sound you hear is me, preening.
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