Frank Drake, who inspired the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, died at the age of 92. Bill Diamond, president of the SETI Institute, says that Frank was the first to conduct a SETI experiment.
Drake was born in the city. He served as an electronics officer on a Navy cruiser after graduating from Cornell University with a degree in engineering physics. He received his PhD in astronomy.
His SETI quest began when he was working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Unbeknownst to him, in 1959 a pair of physicists had published a research paper speculating about how far radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations could travel. According to the senior astronomer for the SETI Institute, the distance is light-years. Drake had started leading an effort to look for signals in the sky. Project Ozma was the first attempt to search for alien signals and was named after the princess in The Wizard of Oz. He pointed the facility's 85-foot radio telescope at Tau Ceti and a few other nearby star systems, searching for bumps or wiggles above the background noise that might be signs of an intentional broadcast. Near the 21-centimeter emission line of hydrogen, he was able to tune in to a specific range of frequencies. It's a quiet part of the radio spectrum, so it's a good place to use as ahailing Frequency. He and his colleagues heard static even though there was a false alarm.
Drake was contacted by the National Academy of Sciences to help organize a conference about SETI after the Green Bank experiment didn't find any alien messages. The pivotal 1961 meeting brought together an influential and eclectic group of scientists, including the chemist Melvin Calvin, a dolphin intelligence researcher, the authors of the 1959 paper, and a young Carl Sagan, who would become a frequent collaboration with Drake.
The Drake Equation was developed at that conference by Drake. The formula tries to reach a figure for the number of alien societies that could exist within our universe and that may be trying to communicate with us. The birth rate of stars, the abundance of planets around them, the fraction of those that are rocky, and the estimated lifetime of those civilizations are some of the variables.
No one knows how long intelligent civilizations last because of the variables about stars and planets. We don't have any other civilizations to draw from. Humans are just babies, and they have already threatened their very existence with nuclear war and climate change, and still don't know how to protect themselves from killer asteroids. The terms of the equation are not known. The equation is a good way to organize your knowledge. It shows that intelligent life and our efforts to listen for it need to be combined with other fields.
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