The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, was kindled by Frank Drake after he pointed a radio telescope at a pair of stars in 1960. The man was 92.
His death was confirmed by the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was a former dean of science.
Dan Werthimer said that Frank inspired millions of Earthlings to think about the question "Is Anybody Out There?" He said that Frank would have to thank Earthlings if they ever find E.T.
The Drake Equation is a tool used to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the universe.
Dr. Drake was a very optimistic person. If humans waited long enough and searched hard enough, they would be able to bridge the vast gaps between the stars with radio waves. He wrote about intelligent life in space in his book.
Radio waves from other intelligent civilizations are falling on the ground. There is a way to build a telescope that can find these waves. Many of the oldest, most important and most exciting questions mankind has asked will one day be answered from somewhere out among the stars.
It has yet to happen. A signal picked up by a Chinese radio telescope was found to be from the Earth.
Dr. Drake once claimed that humans would meet extraterrestrials in his lifetime. He acknowledged in the past that he might not live to see contact made with 100 billion stars and planets in the universe.
Frank Donald Drake was the oldest of three children. His parents were a chemical engineer and a music teacher.
Frank was able to play the accordion at Italian weddings because he was good at it. He was a big fan of astronomy and chemistry. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1952.
He married Elizabeth Bell in 1953. They had three children and divorced. He married Amahl at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.
She is survived by their daughters, his sons from his first marriage, Steve, Richard and Paul, and a brother. The sister of his was dead.
After three years as the electronics officer on the U.S.S. Albany, Dr. Drake went to Harvard where he received a master's degree in astronomy and a PhD.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory was where he got his first job. He went back to a childhood dream of alien life when he found a research program for a telescope in 1960.
Dr. Drake pointed the telescope at a pair of sunlike stars that were about 11 light-years away. The Ozmascope is currently on display at Green Bank. He was able to detect a signal from a rogue aircraft radar, but it drew the attention of the public.
A year later, in November 1961, 10 scientists, including the young Carl Sagan and John Lilly, gathered at the Green Bank observatory to ponder the extraterrestrial question. They did it quietly because of professional ridicule. They called themselves the Order of the Dolphin.
Dr. Drake's equation was used to organize the agenda at Green Bank. All human astronomy knowledge and aspiration are included in the factors. The rate at which stars are born is an empirical example. The average lifetime of a technological civilization is 1000 to 100 million years. If you add all the factors together, you get the census.
According to a spokesman for the SETI Institute, the old guesses of the Dolphins have held up. The estimates of the abundance of potentially Earth-size planets have been verified by NASA, and there could be hundreds of millions of them in the Way galaxy alone.
The Dolphins were either lucky or prescient according to Dr. Shosak.
Scientists have discovered that life on Earth is more versatile and tougher than they had thought. There is a lot of evidence for the origins of life.
He joined Cornell as a professor and later became the director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, or NAIC, whose giant 300-meter antenna in Arecibo, P.R., would become the premier.
He came up with the term "Pulsar" for the objects being discovered in the radio sky. Dr. Drake found a radiation belt around Jupiter and discovered that Venus was as big as an ocean.
SETI would stay with him.
Project Cyclops was a study on how to detect alien life. It called for an array of 1,000 radio telescopes, each 100 meters in diameter, to look for space out to 1000 light-years. It was one of the recipients of Senator William Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" awards for government waste. The report became a bible for astronomer interested in extraterrestrial affairs.
"For the first time, we had technology where we could do an experiment instead of asking priests and philosophers," said the woman who read the report when she was a graduate student.
Dr. Drake was promoting a view of life in the universe. The Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 missions will be the first to leave the solar system.
Two nude humans and a map of where the craft came from were depicted on a plaque. A few years later, Dr. Drake and a small band of friends collaborated on the Voyager Golden Record, a 12-inch gold- plated copper disc that compiled sights and sounds of Earth and humanity.
Ann said that without Frank there would be no record. She said that they were building a Noah's Ark. The spaceships were launched in 1977.
As part of a celebration of an upgrade to the Arecibo antenna, Dr. Drake beamed the equivalent of a 20-trillion- watt message towards M13, a cloud of 300,000 stars some 25,000 light-years from Earth.
There were 1,679 zeros and ones in the message. The bits were arranged in 73 rows and 23 columns. He tried out the message before sending it off.
None of them could read it.
Dr. Drake moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1984 and became the president of the SETI Institute.
The institute was hired by NASA in 1992 to do part of a scaled down search called the High Resolution Microwave Survey, in which telescopes were tuned to microwave frequencies that gave signals the best chance to travel vast distances. Richard Bryan, Democrat of Nevada, ridiculed it as a waste of taxpayer's money.
Dr. Drake and his colleagues decided to raise their own money. The aim of Project Phoenix is to examine the radio emissions of about 1,000 stars. The project petered out in the early 2000s because it was difficult to get telescope time. Astronomers have begun to look for laser signals from other planets.
Dr. Drake never worked for SETI after retiring from the university. He said in a recent interview that it would take 10 million stars to find extraterrestrial life. Only a few thousand have been looked at.
He said that they could be wrong and that the extraterrestrials needed to help them.
He still believed that they were out there.
He stated in 1997 that life is easy. There are a lot of possibilities. Which way did it begin is the big question.
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