Monday, September 26, 2022

Famous astronomer death noted

Oh, I missed that Frank Drake, of SETI and Drake equation fame, has died:

Often called the father of SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — Frank Drake made the first attempt to detect radio transmissions from life beyond Earth in 1960. He spent decades advancing SETI’s technology and philosophy. Drake was collaborative and helped others to pursue a high-risk, fringe topic whose fruits he might not live to see. He helped to legitimize SETI and pushed humans to address the ultimate question: are we alone?

In 1961, Drake, who has died aged 92, led the first scientific workshop on the search for alien civilizations. To prompt discussion, he wrote on a blackboard several factors — such as the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planets and the chance that those planets harboured life. Multiplied together, these yield an estimated number of communicative, technological civilizations. Six decades later, this calculation — the Drake Equation — remains a scaffold for discussions in the field.

 

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