Great and good FotB RoadRich was kind enough to send over a couple of Frank Drake links: SETI.org. NASA’s astrobiology branch.
And, because that’s just the way these things work, the NYT posted an obit this afternoon:
…
In what he called Project Ozma, after the Wizard of Oz, Dr. Drake alternately pointed the telescope at a pair of sunlike stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, each about 11 light-years from Earth. That telescope, known informally as the Ozmascope, is now on exhibit at Green Bank. The only signal he detected with it was from a rogue aircraft radar, but the effort drew the public’s attention.
A year later, in November 1961, 10 scientists, including luminaries like the young Carl Sagan and John Lilly, who was trying to learn to communicate with dolphins, convened at the Green Bank observatory to ponder the extraterrestrial question. (They did so secretly, fearing professional ridicule.) After Dr. Lilly’s research, they called themselves the Order of the Dolphin.
It was at Green Bank that Dr. Drake, who had planned the meeting, derived his famous equation as a way of organizing the agenda. It consists of seven factors, which range over all human astronomical knowledge and aspiration. Some are strictly empirical, like the rate at which stars are born in the Milky Way and the fraction of those stars with habitable planets. Others are impossibly mystical, like the average lifetime of a technological civilization — 1,000 to 100 million years was the guess. Multiply all the factors together and you get the putative galactic census.
In the realms in which astronomers have actually gotten new data, the old guesses of the Dolphins have held up well, said Seth Shostak, an astronomer and spokesman at the SETI Institute. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite and ground-based telescopes have verified optimistic estimates of the abundance of potentially habitable Earth-size planets, and scientists know from the Kepler mission that there could be 300 million of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
“These guys were either enormously lucky or amazingly prescient,” Dr. Shostak said of the Dolphins.
At the same time, scientists have discovered that life on Earth is tougher and more versatile than scientists had thought, thriving in weird places like boiling undersea vents. “There is so much evidence for lots of pathways to the origin of life,” Dr. Drake said.
Just for giggles, and since I don’t believe I’ve posted this before, here’s a paper I wrote back when I was at St. Edward’s on the Fermi Paradox, Drake’s Equation, and Clarke’s “The Sentinel”. (Yes, this was for an English class. Ask me about that class sometime.)
Moon Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans.
“They were passing segregation laws every other day, and the one hand that would go up and say no was his,” recalled Norman Francis, a longtime friend and the former president of Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution in New Orleans. In the fall of 1952, Mr. Francis became the first Black student to be admitted to Loyola Law School, also in New Orleans. When Mr. Francis arrived early on the first day of classes, Mr. Landrieu was one of three white students who approached him.
“Those three guys walked up to me and said, ‘We want you to know that if you ever need a friend, we’re going to be your friend,’” Mr. Francis said in an interview for this obituary in 2013.
I knew about the Drake equation, of course, but I really never knew the background of how it was developed or arrived at. I believe that those people were a bit of both lucky and prescient. Even when I took a test in high school, when I wasn’t sure of an answer, and had to guess, the guess was educated a bit, with some knowledge of the subject, and some idea of the answer. I think that is how the Drake equation was arrived at, with a combination of luck, and a group consensus based on their combined knowledge of physics, statistics, and other factors.
The story of Mr. Landrieu approaching Mr. Francis on his first day of classes, and offering his friendship, really is a testament to his character, especially i 1952 New Orleans. Would that we all had the courage now that he displayed then.
I know that I never thought that I was racially biased, having grown up with my parents with some of their closest friends being minorities. Yet I still recognize that within my own inner being, I fight the battle like anyone. I can see someone in a dark parking lot coming at me, and I have a different reaction within myself, depending on the race of the individual. So I still struggle with that part of my character, even if I don’t react any differently on the outside.
Happy Labor Day, and with the unofficial end of summer and start of fall, have a safe and enjoyable changing of the seasons.