a tale of two Drakes

Great as Sir Francis was to have circumnavigated the earth and defended England against the Spanish Armada, he is not one of the Drakes of whom I speak.

First is Edwin Drake, the "crazy man" whose determination founded the oil industry.

Then there's Frank Drake who devised the Drake equation 'in the 1960s in an attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which we might come in contact.' The conditions for a temperate world conducive to life are rare. One recently recognized condition that has come to light of late is the fortuitous presence of our moon. But of greatest concern to us is the last factor in his equation, L, which is the expected lifetime of intelligent communicative civilization. Drake himself conservatively estimated L as 10 years, a minimum. We can today safely raise that value to around 50 years. Carl Sagan in the 12th episode of his TV series Cosmos, Encyclopedia Gallactica, speculates that we have only a 1 in 100 chance of surviving past 100 years. Sagan's main fear was of nuclear war, but he lists the other dangers, such as resource depletion.

Human-like life is very rare in the Universe; let us not waste it.  I think a fitting analogy for our place in the Universe, taken from Buddhist scripture, is that of a blind turtle surfacing on the ocean once every one hundred years and poking its head through a floating ring!

Here's a site that predicts the worst and soon, even as evidenced in its name, Dieoff.