SETI Pioneer Frank Drake beneath the massive radio dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the largest single-aperture telescope ever built.
Less than a month before turning 30, Frank Drake flipped a switch and started listening to the stars. It was 8 April 1960, and Project Ozma - the first ever SETI search - had begun.
And although 50 years have passed with no clear evidence of extraterrestrials out there, Drake remains convinced that humanity has barely scratched the surface. The search has barely begun.
His influence in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - or SETI, as it is commonly known - has been enormous.
Drake not only conducted the first radio search for civilisations beyond Earth, he helped Carl Sagan design plaque in 1972 that was attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the first of humanity's emissaries to leave the Solar System.
In 1974, to mark the reopening of the Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico - the world's largest - he transmitted humanity's first interstellar message: a three-minute binary signal with a pictogram of DNA, a graphic of the Solar System, and 10 other items meant to describe our world to extraterrestrials. It was aimed at the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away.
But he is best known for creating the enormously influential equation that bears his name - the Drake Equation. the enormously influential equation that bears his name - the Drake Equation.
Devised in 1961 ahead of a conference on the it is simple yet incredibly powerful. It seeks to quantify the unquantifiable: the potential number of extraterrestrial civilisations in our galaxy. And it is still used today.
The following in an interview conducted with the SETI pioneer in February 2010.
When you talk about your famous equations, what do you think all the years after you first published it?
People keep asking, ‘should the equation be changed?’ The answer is no. It still works. It’s still correct.
The only thing that’s changed is the numbers we put into it. When I first invented the equation we had to guess some of the factors in the equation. A lot of those have now been established through observation. For instance the fraction of stars that have planets – we know now that it is more than half. The number of possible habitable planets in a system is higher than we thought in the past – because we’ve discovered things such as oceans in places we thought they couldn’t exist, such as Europa.
SETI = Stupid Efforts To Investigate
Continue this joke. SETI is the biggest joke, while continuing ignorring UFO facts !
RE
SETI is not a joke pal, if you're here and you don't get it, there's something very wrong with you.
SETI
Careful, your arrogance is showing.
S.E.T.I
Stupid Earthling Typo Ignoramus
The Great Lakes- Graveyard of UFO's
Since the Ice Age ended with the retreat of glaciers, sweeping everything off of North America into tidy little piles of glacial morraine in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Quebec, Illinois, doesn't it make sense that any UFO crashes during those thousands of years of glaciation would be carried right into this debris deposit area? The Great Lakes are a Graveyard of UFO's. If you're interested in reading some great Sci-Fi, check out my novel Dark Machine, about just such a UFO, (first 30 pages for free) contact me at my email moviequiz@juno.com - Cheers, Author Dan Ronyak
Consider this
Once a super advanced civilization detects a single other civilization they are going to pour resources into detecting others.
Read the http://argus.naapo.org/~rchilders/swe_argus_pubs/04447343_Argus.pdf and imagine if we spent billions and made an eight million antenna element array.
i.e. with technology 2000 years in future an with the incentive of having already detected another civilization.
I'm imagining a huge space bound , wide bandwidth phased array simultaneously beam forming the entire sky to high level of resolution and with a huge computation power to detect non-random signals.
Any non random transient signal would be detected and located almost instantly.
Given that detecting other civilizations is possible and once they have, they do this, then the most effective method for us at present to communicate with another intelligent race is to burst transmit short high powered spread-spectrum non-random directional signals systematically across the entire sky.
Then wait for them to point their 2000 years ahead of us antimatter powered multi-peta watt transmitter at us.
When it gets back to us (in 2000 years time) we will be ready with the receiver to receive it.
are you in sixth grade?
looking for radio "signals" in a universe of radio signal emitting objects and objects for those signals to bounce off is idiotic and that our nation has spent billions of dollars looking for these signals is shameful...
of course we will detect large numbers of signals
and have no way of knowing what they mean
maybe they will send us a pictogram in binary of god
only we have never seen god so we would have no idea what they were sending us...
DNA pictures?...did drake ever graduate college?
what a shame
any of us knows his name
Hope springs eternal.... and that's better than despair.
Your criticism of this person for imagining a future where humanity is focused on discovery rather than destruction speaks volumes on the sad state of affairs we have created for our civilization. Your disgust at the "$ billions" spent on SETI made me stop and think for a minute. If true, that is a lot of money to be spent on a project with little to show for its efforts. But, when it's put in perspective and measured relative to the amount of money we spend on warfare and weapons of mass destruction, it seems like a trivial expense.
More importantly it provides mankind with benefits that go beyond the intended goal of hearing a non-random radio signal, that go beyond the adavances in our understanding of the electro-magnetic spectrum. It provides us hope; hope that the future could be better than the past, hope that the history we make today will result in a kinder, gentler tomorrow. It gives us a view of ourselves that looks past ethnic and racial differences and helps us realize we are one people. It gives us a goal to focus our efforts on that doesn't involve killing one another. It brings us together as humans and gives us hope that we can unite as one people to support an elusive goal of making contact with another civilization.
Hope is what keeps us going, it's the thing that makes us get out of bed in the morning and struggle through another day. Without hope, we are left with despair, so I say it is money well spent. Especially if it helps us believe more like this young man/woman and less like you.