I only read the abstract, but from that I gather that the paper points out the (rather obvious) fact that the classic Drake equation ignores uncertainty, and that when you put realistic uncertainty bounds on the parameters, the total uncertainty is so large as to make the result meaningless.
> Imagine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 billion alien civilization. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one parameter Drake Equation, we determine that on average there should be 5 billion alien civilizations. Since we see zero, that’s quite the paradox, isn’t it?
No. In this case the mean is meaningless. It’s not at all surprising that we see zero alien civilizations, it just means the coin must have landed tails.
