The Drake Recount: What the Measured Numbers Do and Do Not Conclude

The Drake equation was written in 1961, when the confirmed exoplanet count was zero and every factor after the star formation rate was an educated guess. This paper recomputes the equation with the factors that have since been measured: the Milky Way star formation rate from Licquia and Newman (2015) and Elia et al. (2022), the fraction of stars with planets from Cassan et al. (2012), and the habitable-zone rocky planet occurrence from Bryson et al. (2021) and Petigura et al. (2013), against a confirmed exoplanet census that passed 6,000 in September 2025 (NASA Exoplanet Archive). A Monte Carlo calculation (400,000 samples) combining the measured astrophysical factors with explicitly stated guess ranges for the four unmeasured factors gives a median N = 4.53, a 16-84% range of 0.0168 to 1.21e3, and P(N<1) = 0.397. A variance decomposition of log10 N shows the measured astrophysical factors contribute only 0.3% of the output variance, while the four guessed factors contribute 99.7%, with longevity L alone contributing 55.2%. The pessimistic conclusion that we are alone is therefore not forced by the modern measured numbers. This paper does not claim that extraterrestrial life exists; it claims only that present arithmetic cannot conclude that it does not.