Editing Openai/6946e998-79f0-8007-9a65-19828450838d (section)

=== Assistant: Here is a crude lognormal bell-curve for the number of intelligent-life worlds that may have existed over the Milky Way… ===
Here is a crude lognormal bell-curve for the number of intelligent-life worlds that may have existed over the Milky Way’s history, based on the pessimistic baseline and the low/mid/high factor ranges you asked for.
* Left tail → ~10 worlds (your pessimistic lower bound)
* Right tail → ~5×10⁷ worlds (stacking all high-end assumptions)
* Peak → around 10⁴–10⁵ worlds, consistent with the geometric midpoint of the ranges

The curve is plotted in log-space along the x-axis, since the uncertainty spans many orders of magnitude.

The graph above is generated directly from a simple lognormal model using:
* log₁₀ mean ≈ 4.3
* log₁₀ std ≈ 1.5

These values produce a distribution whose support runs from the pessimistic extreme (~10) to the plausible optimistic extreme (~50 million), with a peak in between.

If you want a version with shaded uncertainty bands, a linear-axis variant, or multiple curves representing different priors, I can generate those as well.