Drake Equation and SF

[subplotkudzu]

While the votes are still no where near being in, I am noodling with what I might do with a 'start from scratch' Traveller game. One idea that came to mind is how one could model various SF series based on where they weight the Drake Equation. (an additional factor might be added for those who have obtaoed FTL travel).

The Foundation Series, for example, effectively zeroes out the number of planets other than Earth develop intelligent life.

Pournelle's CoDominion, what I know if it, is very close to that, with only one other sentient species (the Moties) appearing.

Known Space, on the other hand, has moderately high numbers across the board, with several communcation-capable intelligent species, but several more habitable but non-sentient race worlds for those species to colonize. 

Stephen Baxter's Xeelee stories keep the "viable planets that will develop life" at 100%, but greatly expands the definition of 'viable' so there are living ice creatures in the ice on pluto and elsewhere across the Sol system.
 
Jack McDevit's Priscilla Hutchens novels, while they have a low number of habitable worlds per star, focus on the low length of time any civilization survives to send messages into space, so our heroes find several artifact rich dead worlds or peoples collapsed back to a pre-gasoline tech level.

This is just me playing with an idea, but has anyone ever seen this discussed in an RPG context.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It's also interesting how very few, if any, SF writers adopt the "rare life" position. There are always tons of planets with basically Earthlike environments and even native life people can eat, even if humans are the only intelligent (or technological) species.

I'd like to see a setting in which _life_ is common but _multicellular_ life is vanishingly rare. So there are plenty of worlds where the oceans are a soup of single-celled organisms but the land is barren and erosion-scarred. Humans could move right in, but they'd have to do a lot of terraforming to make the place livable.

Cambias

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I don't know how much of that is not wanting to get into seeding and terraforming and what not.

The setting you describe does lend itself to some options (of course, I'm now looking at it from a Traveller lens), though rather than vanishingly rare I'd go with just rare, so that prospecting starships could look for the mother load of non-eroded worlds they could claim and sell to terraformers at huge profits.