Some SETI vindication

A while back, I wrote about an "interview" I had with E.T. the Extraterrestrial, disputing the idea that alien intelligence is unlikely:

ET: Well look, [P.Z Myer's] guilty of the same anthropocentrism he accuses Sagan of having when he says technological capability has only evolved once on earth. So what? It always evolves only once per planet, from the perspective of the first species to get it on that planet. That doesn't make it unique.

And this is in a recent interview with Frank Drake of the SETI Institute, who knows what he's talking about:

[Astrobiology Magazine]: Although we have no evidence for intelligent life in our own solar system other than Earth.

[Frank Drake]: But that’s meaningless. Probably every planet can produce more than one intelligent species eventually. But they do it at different rates. So on every suitable planet in very many planetary systems, there may be many intelligent species about to appear, but one is always first. And the first one looks around and says, “We’re the only smart ones!” It is the only way it can be, and this is greatly misunderstood. This inevitable situation does not say that a planet can produce only one intelligent species. This fact says nothing about the probability of intelligent life or the possible eventual number of intelligent civilizations.

Nice to see that agreement.