"Beam me up, Scotty"

Avi Loeb advocated not for just relying and producing according to processes, equations and mechanics but also by concepts, novel approaches on what to proceed that should be included as a contributing factor in progression of science.

"Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life here." Was a motto for some a couple decades past. Now, that may be realized. Not relying on the formulations, like odds of only trolling a lake or ocean, that by sheer volume of numbers for those like the Drake equation of decades ago, that we should come across evidence that there is intelligent life evolved elsewhere in the big sky.

There is Voyager, etc. out in deep space. Has anything responded to those?  Or to the outgoing binary language, 0,I?

Not only in the intervening years since the Drake equation's conception and later Carl Sagan  has there not been found any supported evidence of intelligent life, despite all of our advanced technology, but another model being followed may not support any to be found. Earlier, Enrico Fermi has posed another challenge which has not been by itself ignored, it was called the "Fermi paradox", i.e. 'where are they?'.

A team led by Anders Sandberg of Oxford may be following a sobering model, submitted a paper in early June 2018.

The team assumes the Drake equation and then scrutinizes the component factors of it. The team works on the efficiency of the factors to see if they can be made more accurate and how coordinative toward a resolution they can be.

by 2nd result:

"our updated probabilities suggest that there is a substantial probability that we are alone."

"As we will see, the fact that answers only span eight orders of magnitude appears to be due to overconfidence-the range should be substantially wider."

"In our view the practice of using point estimates in Drake equation-like frameworks is largely responsible for the continued puzzlement about the Fermi paradox."

"We shall see that it is the presupposition of certainty that is creating the appearance of a paradox (by falsely representing how certain we are that there are many civilizations out there.)"

"That is to say, given our uncertainty about the values of the parameters, we should not actually be at all surprised to see an empty galaxy. The probability is much higher than under the point estimate approach because it is not unlikely to get a low product of these factors (such as 1 in 200 billion) after which a galaxy without ETI becomes quite likely."

"Given a distribution on N, we can calculate the distribution of the expected distance to the nearest civilization. Again the synthetic distribution has an optimistic outlook, with a 50% chance of it being within a kiloparsec, but also a non-trivial probability to the nearest civilization being far beyond the observable universe."

 Eventually, they focus on gauging the components of intelligent life (fi) and its longevity (fl). They surmise that their works are applicable either to the galaxy or "observable universe.", after working with Stuart Armstrong in 2013. It also includes consideration of conditions of "abiogenesis", after stating other life theories have fallibility.

Much of the premise derives from the hypothesis that intelligent life hibernates during extreme heat and becomes active in a cooled down universe, aestivation.

Early on, in the paper, they point out the possible error of others relying on values of only points of the formula. They say there could be a better gauging if someone would include a wider region or target to possibly better the numbers derived. They attempt to work on reliable confidence levels for the components, despite current disparities between them. It is mentioned that some of the region of the points could be expanded to be more inclusive.

"The results...are similar to those generated by the literature sampling method, but even stronger. The mean for N is very optimistic, at 27 million, but the median is now only 0.32-less than one civilization per galaxy like our own."

An intriguing feature on these formulas and their spread of civilization. One, is that mostly all of assumed civilizations start out small at a host location. And so their boundaries of exploration are small, their perceptions of the world are limited to known areas. This, early on, would not fan the desire of expansion. And who knows how long such a early stage like this will last plus one considers whatever physical objects or environments there would have to be overcome, or lack of such. A second, using our planet as an example, is indeed a desire, a compelling. Not only did our planet start out with small groups, this could occur at another civilization, but they adopt and perpetuate an attitude of being nonaggressive, nonexpansive in favor of a harmonious, peaceable co-existence and thus quell or not encourage or support desires that lead to expansion, exploration. Large areas of our planet were inhabited by such cultures that espoused harmonious nonviolence, nonaggression two thousand and more years ago. Their values held sway with the populace back then. (some examples, Essenes, early Christianity, Sikhs, Buddhism, Sufi, some Hindu, Jainism, some Taoists.) These could be very real reasons why some civilizations with intelligence may not be detected. Yet, they will not be endangered either. It could be that such societies arise in a pocket that is somewhat isolated in the voluminous universe and so their isolated development won't be exposed to outside contacts or less so, and develop as they will in a nonengaging style.

The main points of this article: arxiv:1806.02404

A leading, related 2017 paper with Stuart Armstrong, "That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi's paradox"