Yes, we've got at least ballpark estimates on the first three terms now: star formation rates have been known for decades, but the Kepler data brings us the fraction of stars with planets and the fraction of planets that are potentially habitable. The rest of the terms are going to have to wait a long time, however.…

Is Starbucks paying somebody for that Guardians series? Starbucks employees are usually pretty friendly but 'angels' is a bit hard to swallow.

This is one thing that makes me skeptical of the dates proposed by Vinge and Kurzweil, however it's important to note the difference between dates based on gut feeling (Vinge's 30 years figure), and dates based on Moore's Law bringing processing power up to human-brain equivalency (Kurzweil's 2040s figure).

You've stated the reasoning very nicely. Let me add/sum up my view:

So maybe we need to start listening for aliens on hydrogen * tau, as well as H * pi? The ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is going to be constant anywhere in the universe, but they might think like Hartl and consider the ratio of circumference to radius to be more important.

@Spaceknight: [io9.com]

@Stueymon: Actually the track in the Exist trailer is Godspeed You! Black Emperor's East Hastings, though it is also in the 28 Days Later soundtrack so I see how you could get confused.

@dopepope: It's pretty expansive, as you still have that whole world created for the main game, bedecked with zombies and mayhem. No leveling system, though, unless you count leveling up your deadeye ability.

One thing that might be a point in its favor is that, unlike most tie-in games these days, it's not being rushed out to meet a movie release date. There's no reason for a licensed game to be worse than an IP native to the videogame medium so long as it has enough development time- as evidenced by Arkham Asylum.

@Evdor: Yeah, we all know that markets have traditionally been excellent at winnowing out products without scientific merit.

@Clutchman83: "It's gotta work somehow... unless they are just scamming people but that doesn't make sense to me because they've basically staked their names on this being a workable product."

@gmuslera: I'm trying and failing to parse this sentence.

@Old Mac Throwback: That's perfectly ridiculous, you have no idea what you're talking about, and please shut up.

@TheGreat&PowerfulTurtle: You're also refusing to follow rather simply laid-out math that is using for its assumptions nothing more than what is stated in the article you linked. Let me make this simple for you:

@TheGreat&PowerfulTurtle: Um. Most modern microprocessors at least rival a human synapse in complexity. The article you're referencing states that a synapse has roughly a thousand switches. The processor in an iPhone has something like 200 million. So a typical small, cheap modern processor is a hundred thousand…

@TheGreat&PowerfulTurtle: Well, the iPhone and other comparable smartphones are actually several hundred times as powerful as UNIVAC, but I'm not offering that as 'proof' of anything. Moore's Law continuing indefinitely into the future is just an assumption, and if that assumption isn't valid this whole debate will be…

@artum: The key is to copy it a tiny bit at a time, and shut off each tiny bit of the original brain after you copy it, perhaps over several hours or more.

@TheGreat&PowerfulTurtle: So? My iPhone has more switches than all computers on Earth a few decades ago. We're not going to just keep finding the brain is more complex than we thought forever; at some point it boils down to chemistry. That only puts off the time when computing power will begin to equal brains.

Ugh. There's so much wrong with this. I try to stay skeptical of the Singularity, because it's an idea that strongly appeals to me and that by itself makes me wary of putting too much faith in it, but this is bad skepticism.

@corpore-metal: Another great high-brow treatment is David Brin's "Glory Season".