The Drake Equation for Information, Why the Future of the Internet Will Be Fun

So there is this equation, named after Frank Drake, that allows one to guess the potential number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy. You make a guess for a bunch of probabilities and multiply them all up and the numbers are rather amazing. When I think of ideas, I think there is kind of an equivalent equation for all the ideas out there that are meaningful to you, from those that are just neat to the oh-shit-my-view-of the-world-just-did-a-180-and-I-have-to-sit-down ideas. So here goes:

I_like = P x I_day x f_web x f_publish x f_read x f_like

I_like - The number of ideas you like, encountered over the course of a single day.

P - The total population of the world, 6,692,030,277 as of 2008.

I_day - The average number of ideas each person has every day that they might share. I will use 10.

f_web- The fraction of people who can read and write and use the internet. I will use 1/10. According to this source 25% of the world has internet access.

f_publish - The fraction that publish their thoughts in a place that you could find. Could be face-to-face, email, blogs, twitter, facebook, whatever. I will use 1/100.

f_read - The fraction of everything published or spoken that you find and actually read. I will use 1/1,000,000.

f_like - The fraction of ideas that you read and like. I will use 1/10.

So 6,692,030,277 x 10 x 1/10 x 1/100 x 1/1,000,000 x 1/10 = 6.6 ideas per day that you like

The first thing I think when I see this is that we don't get squat. We sit on the shore of vast amounts of information and sip a few little drops everyday. Now those drops are many many times more interesting than the average of whats out there, but still very small and no where near whats possible.

So imagine if some cultural shift could multiply each fraction by 10. People could read more and think 10x more thoughts, have some spare time and publish 10x more, and find the internet interesting and read 10x more. The result would be 6,692 interesting ideas per day or 1 idea every 12 seconds. Constant neat stuff that never gets old. Now imagine that 1 out of 10000 ideas you like are really big. You would get one of those every other day.

Now obviously this is too much for any one person so people rank and filter stuff and only the really good stuff gets to you when you have time. Or maybe this overload increases your threshold for what is interesting. And what happens when people get exposed to the world of ideas, come to similar conclusions about what is great, and all start thinking about what everyone else likes. Multiply another 10x to f_like. Information nirvana all the time.