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

==== 4. What this really means ====

Conceptually:
* Your low tail: ~10 ever.
* Your high tail: ~50 million ever.
* A “central tendency” under these (highly subjective) priors: on the order of 10⁴–10⁵ intelligent-life worlds over the entire history of the Galaxy.

All of this is driven far more by the chosen f_life and f_intel ranges than by the astrophysics; the exoplanet/astro parts mostly set the scale (10⁹ Earth-ish HZ planets ever), which is now reasonably well-motivated, while the biological terms dominate the spread, exactly as in Drake-style analyses.