I'm surprised at how jarring the math and background on page 2 feels.
It really feels reflective of a different era, coming from a modern perspective Id never dare include something like that, with a big "scary looking formula" that needed explanation text, in the first half dozen pages. I wouldn't trust the reader to care enough to keep reading one word past the formula if I didn't already have them reasonably invested in the concept. These days there is an endless firehose of pitches in-front of people with the money for all fields artistic, scientific, and financial ... Statistically your odds of making it past their initial selection process gets worse and worse and you’ve even seen some push back against this with more "shotgun" approaches to funding strategies, but this isn't as common outside the startup world. With risk appetites falling we get ever more obsessed with having the initial pitch be hyper-polished to the point I've seen people reference eye tracking studies while designing a slide deck layout, the last hope of "thoughtful consideration" having been extinguished as they try to ensure that the first few glances at their pitch deck slides might entice the viewer to look beyond the thumbnail.
So yeah living in the hyper-optimised pitch environment we have today, page two was a real whiplash moment for me... really just adds to how interesting it is to read this.
Not only that, they wrote part of this math into a monologue for Dr. McCoy, where McCoy was advising Kirk.
In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us.
Don't destroy the one named Kirk.
> And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this.
> And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us.
It doesn't follow.
The bigger the universe, the more it contains exact duplicates of you. If the universe is literally infinite, it is obvious there exists an infinite number of you. We can see only a limited slice of it, but it's not a proof there are no duplicates of you in that slice.
If i recall right (from a documentary or interview with roddenberry) is that he made up the equation (though he knew of the drake equation) to justify that aliens exist to the people he was pitching to. I guess they just didn't believe that many aliens would exist.
>surprised at how jarring the math and background on page 2 feels.
>there is an endless firehose of pitches in-front of people with the money
>living in the hyper-optimised pitch environment
This does seem to be a pitch that worked wonders in such an environment.
On page 1 it says what they want to do, and page 2 its almost like exaggerating the upside of their market to seem mathematically infinite during a startup pitch.
Everyone involved already knew the finite (but huge) size of their (highly lucrative) market at the time, no need to elaborate about it.
Well given how much we have learned about exoplanets, I'd say that at least one number of the assumptions are rather moot. The "how many stars even have planets" can be assumed to be basically "all of them" statistically speaking. ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10684 ) and while we can't yet say much about the specifics of their composition (a spectroscopy of the light passing through earth sized exoplanet atmospheres is at the cutting edge of research, with people mostly still working on new instruments, and trying to find lucky candidates where we can get any reading at all with current instruments) but we can definitely impact the lower bounds a bit here since based on current data, about 1 in 5 stars is suspected to have an earth sized planet. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.6806 )
So the "... if only one in a billion of these stars is a sun with a planet... ... and only one in a billion of these is of earth size--" is now " 1 in every 5 stars has an earth sized planet and if only X% are earth like"
It really feels reflective of a different era, coming from a modern perspective Id never dare include something like that, with a big "scary looking formula" that needed explanation text, in the first half dozen pages. I wouldn't trust the reader to care enough to keep reading one word past the formula if I didn't already have them reasonably invested in the concept. These days there is an endless firehose of pitches in-front of people with the money for all fields artistic, scientific, and financial ... Statistically your odds of making it past their initial selection process gets worse and worse and you’ve even seen some push back against this with more "shotgun" approaches to funding strategies, but this isn't as common outside the startup world. With risk appetites falling we get ever more obsessed with having the initial pitch be hyper-polished to the point I've seen people reference eye tracking studies while designing a slide deck layout, the last hope of "thoughtful consideration" having been extinguished as they try to ensure that the first few glances at their pitch deck slides might entice the viewer to look beyond the thumbnail.
So yeah living in the hyper-optimised pitch environment we have today, page two was a real whiplash moment for me... really just adds to how interesting it is to read this.