Frank Drake was an astronomer who performed the first search for extraterrestrial intelligence around other stars. The man was 92. His daughter posted the news on her website. She wrote that her father left a titanic absence.
Andrew Siemion is the Director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He helped create the framework through which we can use astronomy and physics to understand and answer questions. He was still humble and generous. Frank will be ranked among the greatest scientists of all time by our descendants.
Frank was a wonderful, gentle giant in SETI and he was the opposite of competitive scientists.
Drake was born in Chicago on May 28, 1930. Drake and his two younger siblings were raised by their parents in strict accordance with Baptist fundamentalism. He said that this gave him an appreciation for different ways of life and a dislike for organized religion. In a 1992 memoir he co-authored with Dava Sobel, he said that his parents didn't know how to have fun. When Drake was eight years old, his father told him that our world was not the only one in space. The Museum of Science and Industry is blocks from his family church.
Drake received an engineering degree from Cornell University. He spent three years as an electronics officer on the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Albany. He studied radio astronomy under Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who was renowned for correctly suggesting that stars were made of hydrogen and helium. Drake became an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, after obtaining his PhD.
Drake was catapulted to global fame, but he was not the only one. The first radio map of the center of the Milky Way was created by him. The temperature and density of Venus were measured by Drake. He served as the director of the Puerto Rico-based Arecibo Observatory for decades, which was the world's largest radio telescope. Outside of science, he was interested in cultivating orchids.
From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, there was a period of SETI- related productivity.
The first time he used a radio dish was in 1960 when he was looking for aliens in the vicinity of two stars. The two-month effort was called "Project Ozma" and was named after the series of children's books. Ozma was the first-ever modern SETI campaign because of the comparatively crude observations made by both Guglielmo Marconi and NikolaTesla. The first false alarm for the then-nascent field was caused by a signal from a high altitude aircraft.
"If you look at today's radio SETI experiments, they're all still doing Project Ozma." The experiment is about looking for narrowband signals coming from the sky. That was Franks idea.
A year after Project Ozma, Drake made his second landmark contribution, as elite scientists gathered to discuss SETI. Drake showed an equation to estimate the number of visible civilizations in the sky. An ascending scale of ever- greater unknowns, ranging from well-constrained estimates of star-formation rates to educated guesses about the prevalence of habitable planets, were some of the factors in the equation. It was a way of guiding the three-day meeting's agenda, hoping to get the attendees to help hone its values. His Drake Equation became a dominant force shaping all future SETI efforts, as well as a potent reflection of our own Earth bound biases and assumptions about the nature of life and intelligence in the wider universe.
Drake said it had stood the test of time. I have not had to change the factors. There are many suggestions for adding other factors to it.
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Drake became the director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center in 1974 after he was promoted to a tenure-track position at Cornell University. Drake used the facility to transmit a radio signal towards M13, a star cluster more than 22,000 light-years away, after overseeing three years of work that boosted the giant dish's sensitivity. Drake's Arecibo message wascoded in the transmission's frequencies. The double-helix structure of DNA, the dimensions of the human form, and the location of Earth are some of the details detailed in this series of pictograms. The transmission lasted less than three minutes, but at its specific wavelength it beat the Sun by a factor of 100,000. The Arecibo Observatory's 1,000 foot wide dish collapsed in late 2020 due to under funding and neglect. Maybe it will be rebuilt. Even if it isn't, its transmission will keep going through the void.
Drake wasn't the first or the last person to do such work, but his farthest reaching attempt was the Arecibo message. In 1972, Drake co-designed the Pioneer plaque, which included illustrations of a nude man and woman, and was bolted to NASA's interstellar-bound Pioneer 10 and 11 spaceship. The first physical message was sent out of the solar system. The Voyager Golden Record was designed by Drake and other people in 1977. A collection of sights, sounds and greetings from Earth was packed into a bottle and sent to another planet.
There wouldn't have been a record if it wasn't for Frank. His idea was to make the message a record of sound, rather than a record of information.
SETI would look very different today if not for Drake. He conducted Project Ozma and sought radio signals in order to find a civilization. Ronald Bracewell, an astronomer and engineer, suggested that researchers look for probes in our solar system. Physicist Charles Townes believed that lasers would be a better way to communicate with other planets. Dyson thought he could find the quietest technological cultures by looking for huge energy-harvesting structures around their home stars.
According to a Penn State University astronomer and director of its Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, the fact that radio SETI came to be the defacto standard was due in part to Drake's showmanship Frank was aware of the power of demonstration in each case of Project Ozma and the Drake Equation. His name is revered because it is attached to the famous experiments that captured the public's imagination and got the attention of philanthropists.
Drake wrote in the introduction to his 1992 memoir that he finds the thought of radio messages from alien civilizations in space exciting. It was a way of seeing the history of the future as any that humans were likely to detect would be much older and more advanced than our own. He left Cornell in 1984 and went to work at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the SETI Institute. For the rest of his life, both would be his primary academic affiliations.
He boasted in the book that NASA had just dedicated $100 million to the SETI effort. SETI had gained mainstream acceptance after years of being fringe. SETI seemed on the verge of a legitimate detection of signals from an extraterrestrial civilization and proof that we were not alone. He said that the discovery would change the world before 2000.
The program was canceled less than a year after it was inaugurated. NASA once again allocated minuscule fractions of its budget to SETI studies, but this situation has only started to change in the past few years. Many Silicon Valley technologists had been inspired to pursue science and engineering careers by Project Ozma and other rousing exploits of the early age space.
UC Berkeley astronomer Dan Werthimer says he would be filthy rich if it weren't for Frank. Frank was the one who helped me figure out how to use the first computer chips for SETI experiments. The co-founding of SETI@Home in 1999 was the result of those efforts and was one of the first and most successful "citizen science" projects.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen gave a lot of money to the SETI Institute. The Allen Telescope array in Hat Creek began operations in 2007. Berkeley SETI director Siemion, who was one of Drake's last associates, was one of the funders of the ambitious SETI program called Breakthrough Listen. Project Ozma would tune in periodically to two stars on a single channel, but Breakthrough Listen targets millions, observing each on tens of billions of frequencies with sensitivities suitable for detecting even some forms of modest, unintentional alien radiation. After the first discoveries in the early 1990s, astronomy's knowledge of exoplanets has grown to the point where it now fills thousands of catalogues. Data shows that most stars have a retinue of worlds, which suggests that Drake's quest may not be in vain. Some fraction of the host must be Earth-like and have life. In keeping with Drake's equation, some small fraction still needs to host other minds that gaze up in awe at the heavens from their isolated planetary perch, wondering if they, too, are alone.
The skies are still quiet. SETI has not been able to find its quarry because of a number of candidate signals. It has been a failure so far because we haven't found anything. What a great ride. I think it all comes back to Frank.
Will we ever find a sign of intelligent life somewhere in the universe? Drake once said that he thought so.
I think this has just begun. We haven't been able to do any of the things people think we've been able to do. We only play the lottery with a few tickets.
Drake is survived by his wife of 44 years, as well as his daughter, daughter-in-law and sons from previous marriages. He is survived by his sister.
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