Conrad Hodson wrote:

Of course not.  But the trend is running very much in the other direction,
and that's my point.

This 'trend' is meaningless.

Let me give you an analogy.  Suppose you've decided to win one of those
'collect the bottlecaps' games, where there's a letter under each bottlecap
of some soft drink.  If you spell out 'DRAKE EQUATION', you win a million
dollars.

Things go well at first.  You find an A, you find a D, you find a K; indeed,
all the letters you find, you find quickly.  The odds of winning certainly
look like they're improving, no?

No.  Try as you might, you can't seem to get a Q.  All the other letters
are there, but not a Q in sight.  That's because Q controls the number of
winners in this game.  The other letters are essentially irrelevant.

The same thing could be true of the Drake equation.  Most of the terms
in the equation could be large, but this would tell you very little
about whether the result is large, since this would not give you any
information about the other terms.

    Paul