Frank Drake’s Courageous Questions Live On

Carl Sagan said in his landmark TV series that we make our world significant by the courage of our questions. Frank Drake put our planet on a path to greater significance. That didn't deter him. Drake was brave to ask the answer to the question.

What is the universe is a big question in science. What did it start with? We can ask what created life, human beings, and these minds of ours.

Significant progress has been made on all but one of these questions. Science seems to have forgotten a big question. Children looking out into the night have asked about it.

We are alone.

Some of the best engineers of the 20th century, like Guglielmo Marconi, tried to listen for signs of civilization on Mars. The search for life beyond Earth had little prestige, funding or institutional support by the mid century. Until Drake's death. The possibility of other civilizations is more than just an interesting question. It's a fundamental thing. We have an obligation to explore and understand as much as possible if we are alone. They may be the most fascinating phenomenon of all time. He wanted to turn vague speculation into rigorous science.

The first conference on SETI was held in 1961, and Drake helped organize it. The Drake equation was used to define the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe. There were estimates for one of the factors. The origin and evolution of life on the planets were unknown. The equation is both humble and ambitious.

Faced with the seemingly lifeless emptiness of space, Drake quantified our ignorantness and put bounds on it. The leaders of the field were encouraged and inspired by that line of symbols. His power to inspire was not limited to others. I was touched as well.

We joined the Giving Pledge in 2012 to support scientific causes. We were looking for an area of science where our contribution could make a difference, and three people inspired us to found a major new astronomy program.

Talking to Stephen Hawking was the first inspiration. When we moved into our new house, we found out that the pioneer of SETI had once owned it. Looking up from our garden at the night sky, I remembered my own childhood fascination with the question of how I had read and dreamed of Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan's intelligent life in the universe.

Drake was one of the influences. The world's largest single-aperture telescope is located at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico. I gained a better sense of SETI's potential when I stood beside him, by the dish from which he sent the first-ever radio greeting.

The Green Bank conference took place more than 50 years ago and SETI is thriving today. Major telescopes on six continents are collaborating on radio surveys in search of signals thanks to the work of Breakthrough Listen and our partners at the University of California, Berkeley. The telescopes cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs, 100 times faster, and pour out petabytes of data that state-of-the-art machine- learning tools analyze for signals. NASA's discovery that almost all sunlike stars have Earth-like planets has made Astrobiology one of the most fertile fields in science. We don't have intelligence or life yet. There is a better chance of knowing it when we see it.

This is progress, that's right. It all started with a man who had the courage to ask a big question.

The views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those ofScientific American.