Frank Drake

Frank Donald Drake (born May 28, 1930) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the founding of SETI, mounting the first observational attempts at detecting extraterrestrial communications in 1960 in Project Ozma, developing the Drake equation, and as the creator of the Arecibo Message, a digital encoding of an astronomical and biological description of the Earth and its lifeforms for transmission into the cosmos.

Early life and education

Born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, as a youth Drake loved electronics and chemistry. He reports that he considered the possibility of life existing on other planets as an eight-year-old, but never discussed the idea with his family or teachers due to the prevalent religious ideology.

He enrolled at Cornell University on a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. Once there he began studying astronomy. His ideas about the possibility of extraterrestrial life were reinforced by a lecture from astrophysicist Otto Struve in 1951. After college, he served briefly as an electronics officer on the heavy cruiser USS Albany. He then went on to graduate school at Harvard to study radio astronomy.

Drake's hobbies include lapidary and the cultivation of orchids.

Career

Although explicitly linked with modern views on the likelihood and detectability of extraterrestrial civilizations, Drake started his career undertaking radio astronomical research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, and later the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He conducted key measurements which revealed the presence of a Jovian ionosphere and magnetosphere.

In the 1960s, Drake spearheaded the conversion of the Arecibo Observatory to a radio astronomical facility, later updated in 1974 and 1996. As a researcher, Drake was involved in the early work on pulsars. In this period, Drake was a professor at Cornell University and Director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) – the formal name for the Arecibo facility. In 1974 he wrote the Arecibo message.

He is one of the pioneers of the modern field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with Giuseppe Cocconi, Philip Morrison, Iosif Shklovsky, and Carl Sagan.

His 1960 Project Ozma was the first serious search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. It utilized the 85-foot Howard E. Tatel radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, to search for signals from any planets from two nearby sun-like stars, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. That no signals were detected was not unexpected, but the search led to a multiple number of searches that followed and continue into the 21st century.

The experiment was launched after Cocconi and Morrison published their paper on the possibility of communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in Nature magazine in 1959. Drake was concerned about scorn but publication of the Cocconi and Morrison paper stimulated him to proceed in the experiment, which he had been considering.

Drake co-designed the Pioneer plaque with Carl Sagan in 1972, the first physical message sent into space. The plaque was designed to be understandable by extraterrestrials should they encounter it. He later supervised the creation of the Voyager Golden Record. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.

Drake is a member of the National Academy of Sciences where he chaired the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council (1989–92). He also served as President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He was a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University (1964–84) and served as the Director of the Arecibo Observatory. He is currently involved in "The Carl Sagan Center for the Study of life in the Universe" at the SETI Institute.

He is Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he also served as Dean of Natural Sciences (1984–88). He serves on the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute.

The Drake equation

Following Project Ozma, Drake convened a symposium of astronomers interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. To provide a framework for discussion, Drake created an equation consisting of multiplicative factors that would enable an estimate of the number of extant communicative civlizations. The Drake equation has been judged as the second most familiar equation in physics and astronomy, after Einstein's E=mc^2.

Those present at the Greenbank symposium became members of the Order of the Dolphins, a term coined by Drake in reference to the high intelligence of that species. As Drake would discuss in his radio astronomy classes, if the bit rate of communication is considered the definition of intelligence, then dolphins, with their high-pitched chirping sounds, would be considered to be more intelligent than man.

Many general interest as well as technical papers have been written discussing it in general and the values for the various factors in particular. One of Drake's students at Cornell University, Dr. Leslie M. Golden took estimates of the various factors provided by various investigators to find a best value for the product of all the factors except that providing the basically unknown lifetime of communicative civilizations.. The result was N = 0.85 L, close to the value of N = L suggested by Drake himself.

Honors

Drake Planetarium at Norwood High School in Norwood, Ohio is named for Drake and linked to NASA.

In literature

Professor Drake is a figure in the 2017 novel Never Split Tens written by one of his former students at Cornell University, Les Golden of Oak Park, Illinois. The novel was published by Springer Nature.

See also

• Lick Observatory
• The Search for Life: The Drake Equation

References

• "Estimating the Chances of Life Out There"—brief biography for astrobiology workshop at the NASA Ames Research Center.

External links

• "Only a matter of time, says Frank Drake" A Q&A with Frank Drake about his famous equation and the meaning of SETI, from an interview in February 2010, leading up to the 50th birthday of SETI.
• Template:YouTube A public talk by Frank Drake in the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series.
• "The Drake Equation"—Astronomy Cast transcript (html), Fraser Cain and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor, Dr. Pamela Gay, Monday 12 February 2007. (Full pdf transcript.)