Dude in Distress Strip 78
EssayBee on July 23, 2018
Here's strip 78 of Dude in Distress, and it seems Femme's recollections are taking a turn to the more personal.
Since someone will probably bring this up, from the discussion on this page, it seems Drake's Equation likely vastly underestimates the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. However, I suspect that a number of these systems are inhabited by different individual species that have gone interplanetary. (And a populated system could simply be a mining colony on a moon.)
hkmaly at 5:12PM, July 23, 2018
No species capable of traveling to other stars would remain just on single planet unless convinced by generous usage of orbital bombardment. Mining colony might not count as inhabited if it's mostly automatic and noone stays there longer than year. But yes, most of those 17000 systems would likely be populated considerably less than Earth ; it would be mostly the origin planets of every species or maybe first few colonized which would have really lot of people. ... hmmm ... is the number of systems in Empire public?
EssayBee at 7:42AM, July 24, 2018
I think a lot/all of what Femme is telling Clark is stuff she's told government/military officials when she and Admiral Awesome came to Earth. I'd suspect that pretty much all of what she's saying here--if it's not publicly available--could be obtained with a FOIA request. That said, I doubt official transcripts carry the emotional weight that Femme's unloading on Clark.