Science Communications Article

While raising my kids out in the country, on a beautiful little semi-rural acreage west of Bragg Creek, we got to know some neighbours with kids the same age as ours. The dad was a Sasquatch hunter. 

Their property backed onto the wilds of Bragg Creek Provincial Park, which in turn connected to some of Alberta’s most remote wilderness. So it sort of made sense that he would go out into his backyard with a special Sasquatch horn to call to it. He also went to other remote places of western Canada to call to it, so it is not as if he was convinced it lived close by.

I was timid about questioning the logic of his Sasquatch search, but also curious and asked him if he thought it lived alone. 

“We know so little about the Sasquatch that we cannot assume anything,” he answered almost scientifically. “What I find arrogant is that most people assume it does not exist.”

He was aware of the unpopularity of his belief in some circles, and knew I worked in science, so he carried on by way of further explanation. 

“It is also arrogant to assume we are alone in the universe. Why do we think we are so special?”

He had a model of the world that had the possibility of Sasquatch in it, and the possibility of life on other planets.

The scientist in me also accepts the possibility of life on other planets and the Drake equation is a scientist’s way of trying to estimate the likelihood. The probability that there is NOT life on another planet is so uncertain that it does not make sense to assume there would not be. 

Now with a cascade of double negatives like that, your brain is probably swimming in enough doubt as to make room for Sasquatch too. How do we rule out Sasquatch as nonsense (after all, there is no evidence) and NOT rule out life on other planets (also no evidence). 

Perhaps it comes down to probabilities – we know enough about the surface of the Earth to be reasonably confident that we would have seen animals of this size if they did exist. 

However, Dr Drake did not develope the Drake equation in 1961 to provide a precise answer to the question of whether there is life on another planet. He developed it as a framework for organizing thoughts for debate and research at the first meeting of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). 

The most fruitful conversations begin by understanding how people are organizing their thoughts. In this kind of conversation, everyone involved can bring up various factors and conditions that might be at play. 

And this opening up can lead to exciting and unlikely places. 

There are countless examples of ideas that at first seem like preposterous brain candy, and turn out to be based on fact – quantum effects, trees communicating via underground networks, the Third Reich blitzed on opiods. So it behooves us to be respectful about – or maybe even humble about – the many different ways that people are digesting the information coming at them. 

What if we focused on communicating science in a way that helped people organize their thoughts, and took the pressure off rightness or wrongness? That is something the Drake equation can teach us about communicating science.