They're probably in direct contact with millions of civilizations already. Whether we'll be welcome on that galactic Internet, I don't know. The recent discoveries of planets in other solar systems have not affected his estimate. Finding these planets only reinforced his earlier estimates of fp, the fraction of stars with planets. And the number of Earthlike planets, n e , also remains unchanged, he adds, because current techniques can detect only Jupiterlike planets.
Drake admits that no one knows the values of any factor in the equation for sure.
That tells us it's not easy. We have to search many, many stars before we succeed. No matter what numbers you put in, you come up with that result. All stars bend space around them. As a result, rays from distant star systems graze the edge of our sun and come to a focus.