Frank Drake, the eminent radio astronomer who carried out the primary seek for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) round different stars in 1960, died on Friday at his dwelling close to Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 92 years previous. His daughter, science journalist Nadia Drake, shared the information on her web site. “A titan in life,” she wrote, “Dad leaves a titanic absence.”
“Frank based a whole area,” says astrophysicist Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Analysis Middle (BSRC) on the College of California, Berkeley. “He performed an important function in creating the framework by way of which we are able to apply the instruments of astronomy and physics to understanding and answering existential questions. However he by no means misplaced his humility and generosity. When our descendants look again centuries from now, I feel they’ll rank Frank among the many best scientists who ever lived.”
Paul Horowitz, a physicist and Harvard College professor emeritus, whom Drake guided into the sector within the Nineteen Seventies, recollects him as “an exquisite, mild big in SETI…. Usually scientists are aggressive, backbiting and intensely protecting of their turf. Frank was the precise reverse of all of that—simply completely exemplary within the selfless manner he practiced science.”
Born in Chicago on Could 28, 1930, Drake grew up within the metropolis’s South Shore neighborhood. His father, a chemical engineer, and his mom, a homemaker, weren’t religious, however they raised Drake and his two youthful siblings in strict accordance with Baptist fundamentalism. He later stated this gave him a larger appreciation for various methods of life and being—and a lifelong aversion to organized faith. Neither of his dad and mom “appeared to have any concept of easy methods to have enjoyable—at the very least for my part,” he recalled in a 1992 memoir he co-authored with science author Dava Sobel. Drake’s curiosity in extraterrestrial life started at age eight, sparked by his imaginings of alien Earths scattered throughout the universe after his father advised him ours was not the one world in area. He nurtured that spark with occasional visits to the Museum of Science and Business, simply blocks from his household’s church.
Drake graduated from Cornell College in 1952 with an engineering physics diploma. Below the Navy’s ROTC program, he then served three years as an electronics officer onboard a heavy cruiser, the united statesS. Albany. As a graduate pupil and Ph.D. candidate at Harvard College from 1955 to 1958, he studied radio astronomy underneath the tutelage of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a trailblazing astrophysicist famend for appropriately proposing that stars had been largely fabricated from hydrogen and helium. After acquiring his Ph.D., Drake took a employees astronomer place on the Nationwide Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Inexperienced Financial institution, W.V., the place his scientific profession actually started.
Drake’s hunt for electromagnetic transmissions from cosmic civilizations catapulted him to international fame, however it was removed from being his solely important work. He additionally made the primary radio map of the Milky Method’s heart and co-discovered areas of seething radiation round Jupiter which might be analogous to Earth’s Van Allen belts. Drake was among the many first to measure the temperature and density of Venus’s broiling ambiance. His quite a few official appointments included serving as director of the Puerto Rico–based mostly Arecibo Observatory, which was the world’s largest radio telescope for many years. And all through his working life, he taught and mentored generations of youthful researchers. Outdoors of science, his pursuits included wine making, lapidary work and orchid cultivation.
Drake’s three most outstanding analysis achievements stem from a interval of SETI-related productiveness from the early Sixties to the mid-Nineteen Seventies.
The primary got here in 1960, when he used the NRAO’s 85-foot-wide dish in Inexperienced Financial institution to hunt radio alerts from any talkative aliens within the neighborhood of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, two of our nearest and most sunlike neighboring stars. Drake known as the two-month effort Mission Ozma, after The Wizard of Oz collection of youngsters’s books, as a result of each involved fantastical faraway lands inhabited by unique beings. Though a long time earlier inventor Nikola Tesla and physicist Guglielmo Marconi had each independently tried to tune in to alien radio broadcasts, these comparatively crude observations involved putative Martians—not denizens of distant planetary techniques—making Ozma the first-ever “fashionable” SETI marketing campaign. It produced no proof of extraterrestrials, although a sign from a high-altitude plane did as soon as set off a false alarm, the primary of many for the then nascent area.
“If you happen to take a look at at the moment’s radio SETI experiments, they’re all nonetheless doing Mission Ozma,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer on the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the place Drake labored for greater than a quarter-century till he retired in 2010. “They’re doing it with enormously higher gear and with many extra targets, however the experiment itself is to search for narrowband alerts coming from the sky. And that was Frank’s concept.”
Drake’s second landmark contribution got here scarcely a yr after Mission Ozma, amid an invitation-only gathering of elite scientists in November 1961 to debate SETI’s prospects. Opening the assembly, Drake unveiled an equation to estimate the variety of detectable civilizations within the Milky Method. The equation’s seven interlinked elements had been an ascending scale of ever larger unknowns, starting from well-constrained estimates of star-formation charges to educated guesses concerning the prevalence of liveable planets to wild speculations concerning the variety of life-bearing worlds and the longevity of technological cultures. He had concocted it as a manner of guiding the three-day assembly’s agenda, hoping to enlist the attendees (who included a younger postdoctoral researcher named Carl Sagan) to assist hone its values. However his so-called Drake equation additionally grew to become a dominant power shaping all future SETI efforts—in addition to a potent reflection of our personal Earth-bound biases and assumptions concerning the nature of life and intelligence within the wider cosmos.
“It has stood the take a look at of time,” Drake advised the writer of this text in a 2011 interview. “I’ve by no means needed to change the elements, though I’ve tweaked a few of their definitions. And I’ve gotten many options for including different elements to it—like one for politicians.”
Drake’s third signature feat got here in 1974, after his rising star led him to a tenure-track place at Cornell College—in addition to the directorship of the Nationwide Astronomy and Ionosphere Middle, which managed the Arecibo Observatory. After overseeing three years of labor that boosted the enormous dish’s sensitivity and gave it a robust new radar system, throughout a November 1974 opening ceremony, Drake used the power to transmit a radio sign towards M13—a star cluster greater than 22,000 light-years away. Encoded within the transmission’s 1,679 frequency pulses was Drake’s “Arecibo message.” This collection of pictograms detailed, amongst different issues, the double-helix construction of DNA, the scale of the human type and the placement of Earth inside the photo voltaic system. The transmission lasted lower than three minutes, however at its particular wavelength, it outshone the solar by an element of 100,000—providing a shred of hope that in some way, someplace somebody on the market may detect and decipher it. The Arecibo Observatory’s 1,000-foot-wide dish (large enough, Drake as soon as calculated, to carry 350 million containers of cornflakes) tragically collapsed in late 2020 amid allegations of underfunding and neglect. It could but be rebuilt. However even when not, its epochal transmission will proceed to ceaselessly journey by way of the void.
The Arecibo message was Drake’s farthest-reaching try at interstellar signaling, however it was neither the primary nor the final time he was concerned in such work. Collaborating with Sagan and Sagan’s then spouse Linda Salzman Sagan in 1972, Drake co-designed the Pioneer plaque—a pictorial message that was bolted to NASA’s interstellar-bound Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft and that included illustrations of a nude man and lady, in addition to a cosmic map supposed to hint the probes’ origins again to Earth. This grew to become the primary bodily message to be despatched out of the photo voltaic system. In 1977, alongside Sagan and novelist Ann Druyan (who would later marry Sagan), in addition to artist Jon Lomberg and science author Timothy Ferris, Drake helped design the Voyager golden document. This interstellar “message in a bottle,” full of a curated assortment of sights, sounds and greetings from Earth, was launched onboard the Voyager 1 and a pair of probes.
“If it wasn’t for Frank, there wouldn’t have been a Voyager document,” Druyan recollects. “As a result of it was his concept to make the message a phonographic document versus another type for holding all the data.”
Equally, if not for Drake, SETI itself might look very completely different at the moment. Across the time he performed Mission Ozma, searching for radio alerts was solely one in all a number of proposed methods for locating cosmic civilizations. Astronomer and engineer Ronald Bracewell recommended that researchers ought to as an alternative search for probes and different artifacts right here in our photo voltaic system. Physicist Charles Townes, whose work led to the laser’s invention, thought lasers could be a greater foundation for interstellar communication and thus the optimum focus for SETI work. Theorist Freeman Dyson devised a option to discover even the quietest technological cultures, which he surmised could possibly be detected by in search of gigantic energy-harvesting buildings they could construct round their dwelling stars.
In response to Jason Wright, a Pennsylvania State College astronomer and director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Middle, the truth that radio SETI got here to be the de facto customary was linked partly not solely to Drake’s scientific acumen but in addition his showmanship. “What actually strikes me about Mission Ozma, the Drake equation and the interstellar messages is that, in every case, Frank was so conscious of the ability of demonstration,” Wright says. “That’s why his identify is revered—as a result of it’s hooked up to those iconic experiments that captured the general public’s creativeness and obtained the eye of philanthropists, NASA, and so forth.”
“Personally, I discover nothing extra tantalizing than the thought that radio messages from alien civilizations in area are passing by way of our places of work and houses, proper now, like a whisper we are able to’t fairly hear,” Drake wrote with typical understated gusto within the preface to his 1992 memoir. Discovering different cosmic civilizations, he mused, was a manner of seeing “the historical past of the long run” as a result of any such civilizations that people had been prone to detect could be far older and extra superior than our personal, providing a preview of our personal doable fates. By then his time at Cornell was nearly a decade within the rearview—he had left the misty chill of Ithaca, N.Y., in 1984 for California’s sunnier climes, taking on prestigious positions on the College of California, Santa Cruz, and the newly fashioned SETI Institute. Each would stay his main educational affiliations for the remainder of his life.
In the identical ebook he triumphantly famous that NASA had simply devoted some $100 million to a significant, decade-long SETI effort. After years of inhabiting the perimeter of respectable science, SETI had lastly gained mainstream acceptance. To Drake, SETI appeared on the cusp of its best victory: a respectable detection of alerts from an extraterrestrial civilization and proof that we weren’t alone. “This discovery, which I totally anticipate to witness earlier than the yr 2000, will profoundly change the world,” he wrote.
As a substitute congressional backlash resulted in this system’s cancellation lower than a yr later. Thus started SETI’s lengthy sojourn with out one cent of U.S. federal funding dedicated to hunts for alien civilizations (a state of affairs that has solely began to vary up to now few years, after NASA as soon as once more started allotting minuscule fractions of its funds to SETI research). In these tough occasions, Drake and different SETI luminaries more and more relied on funding from the rising class of superwealthy Silicon Valley technologists—lots of whom had been impressed to pursue science and engineering careers by Mission Ozma and different rousing exploits of the early area age.
“If it weren’t for Frank I’d be filthy wealthy,” jokes U.C. Berkeley astronomer Dan Werthimer, who, earlier than changing into Drake’s frequent collaborator, rubbed shoulders with Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak within the Homebrew Laptop Membership within the early Nineteen Seventies. “Whereas different Homebrewers had been designing and promoting the primary dwelling computer systems, because of Frank, I spent my time determining easy methods to make the most of the primary pc chips for SETI experiments.” In 1999 these efforts led to Werthimer co-founding SETI@dwelling, one of many first and most profitable “citizen science” tasks, which used distributed computing and volunteers’ spare CPU cycles to search for alerts in archival SETI information.
Strong assist additionally got here from the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who offered tens of tens of millions of {dollars} to the SETI Institute. This culminated within the 42-dish Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, Calif., which started operations and varied SETI-related research in 2007. That philanthropic pattern continues at the moment with Breakthrough Pay attention, an formidable SETI program funded by Russian-Israeli multibillionaire Yuri Milner and helmed by BSRC’s Siemion, who was one in all Drake’s final protégés. Whereas Mission Ozma tuned in periodically to 2 stars on a single channel, Breakthrough Pay attention targets tens of millions, observing every on tens of billions of frequencies, with sensitivities appropriate for detecting even some types of modest, unintentional “leakage” radiation from stealthy alien societies. All this has been augmented by the explosive progress in information of exoplanets, which, after the primary discoveries within the early Nineteen Nineties, now fill astronomers’ catalogs by the 1000’s. The majority of accessible proof hints that Drake’s nice quest will not be in useless; information point out most stars harbor a retinue of worlds. And chance legal guidelines dictate that from that innumerable starry host, some fraction merely should be liveable, Earth-like and replete with life. In step with Drake’s equation, some smaller fraction nonetheless should then host different minds that gaze up in awe on the heavens from their remoted planetary perch, questioning in the event that they, too, are alone.
And but the skies stay silent. Barring a handful of candidate alerts—tantalizing however suspect onetime occasions that by no means repeated and will simply have been mere astrophysical “noise”—SETI has not discovered its long-sought quarry. “I assume you possibly can say it’s been an enormous failure thus far, as a result of we haven’t discovered something but,” Horowitz says. “However what an exquisite journey. And for me at the very least, all of it comes again to Frank.”
Will we ever discover a solution, some glowing signal of clever life from throughout the interstellar and even intergalactic gulfs? Drake after all thought so, as he as soon as advised the writer of this text:
“This, I feel, has been only the start. Folks presume we’ve been in some way monitoring your entire sky in any respect frequencies, on a regular basis, however we haven’t but been in a position to do any of these issues…. Even when we’ve been pointed in the proper route and listening on the proper frequency, the chance of a message being beamed at us whereas we’re wanting is actually not very giant. We’ve been enjoying the lottery utilizing just a few tickets.”
Along with his daughter Nadia, Drake is survived by his spouse of 44 years, Amahl Shakhashiri Drake; his daughter Leila Drake Fossek; his sons from a earlier marriage, Steve Drake, Richard Drake and Paul Drake; his brother Bob Drake; and a nephew, two nieces and 4 grandchildren. He was preceded in loss of life by his sister Alma Quigley.
