Abstract: Frank Drake originally proposed the Drake Equation to estimate the number of radio-communicating extra-terrestrial civilisations in our galaxy, thus establishing the formal framework for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The argument of this essay takes the discussion of the parameters of this equation as its starting point, and places special emphasis on the last parameter L—the average communicative lifetime of technological civilizations—which brings together questions of technological evolution and planetary habitability. While utilizing concepts native to SETI and astrobiology (e.g. biosignatures, technosignatures, life-as-we-do-not-know-it), the essay works towards the idea of substrate-agnostic ecology (SAE), which represents planetary environmental thinking separated from the Earth-centric and biocentric biases. In this essay, SAE denotes the generic communion of agents that can populate a wide variety of planetary ecologies hospitable to distinct genres of biospheres and intelligences, hence advertising an unapologetically cosmic perspective: no planetary without the extra-planetary.

Read the full article (designed by Andrey Karabanov / ENDS) at Antikythera x MIT Press platform:
https://longl.antikythera.org/