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36 JULY-AUGUST 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING T he Drake equation represented in graphic and photographic form, to make all the terms in- cluded in it more intuitive. I n 1961, at the first meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), Frank Drake proposed his equation to assist in searching for alien life as a way to stimulate scientific discussion. In this picture, Drake poses in front of the Na- tional Radio Astronomy Observatory Green Bank. [NRAO] However, in recent times, some terms of the Drake equation have begun to prove insufficient to cor- rectly represent the weight that the biological and technological contri- butions may have on the discovery of extraterrestrial life. A careful exami- nation of the subject was published last March in The Astrophysical Jour- nal Letters , signed by six of the most famous researchers working in this field: Jason Wright, Jacob Haqq- Misra, Adam Frank, Ravi Kopparapu, Manasvi Lingam and Sofia Sheikh. The authors questioned the aspects of the equation related to the recog- nition of the effects of any technolo- gies used by possible extraterres- trial intelligences. These effects are generically referred to as technosig- natures. In the original formulation, the Drake equation implies that within our galaxy technosignatures must necessarily be less relevant than biosignatures, those that indicate the presence of non-technological life. This is evident by considering that f c is a fraction of f i . According to Wright and colleagues, the opposite may be true, although an objective and quantitative comparison be- tween the relative abundances of yet undiscovered technosignatures and biosignatures is not possible. The main reason why the Drake equation tends to underestimate the weight of technosignatures is because in the early 1960s there was a widespread belief that if there were alien civilizations, we would only discover them by picking up their radio signals, a single type of technosignature. Today we are aware that technosignatures can come in many forms and that the technologies that produce them can