Today’s comic revolves around a fictitious and humorous equation, “The Flake Equation.” The name is, of course, a pun on the famous Drake Equation - an equation created by Frank Drake in the early ’60s that attempts to produce the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way with which contact may be possible.
While the real equation contains a mixture of hypothesized numbers and probabilities about the science of our galaxy, the Author’s comical version uses seemingly arbitrary numbers and probabilities about the people who claim to have seen an alien.
The joke here is that the if Drake Equation attempts to find how many alien civilizations we may actually contact, why not just use the “Flake” equation to find the number of humans who may at some point claim to have made such contact? (since it’s the same thing)
