When Frank Drake created his famous eponymous equation to estimate the number of advanced communicative civilizations in the Milky Way, we had little more than educated guesses for most of the factors in that equation. Decades later we have much better data, and the answer seems to reinforce Fermi's famous paradox: why is our galaxy so silent? The role of plate tectonics in enabling evolution of advanced life forms is examined in new research were a revision to the Drake Equation is proposed, and the unsettling answer may be that we are truly alone.
