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SETI Pioneer Frank Drake Leaves a Legacy of Searching for Voices in the Void
Remembering Frank Drake, who led science in listening for an
extraterrestrial “whisper we can’t quite hear”

By Lee Billings on September 6, 2022
SETI Pioneer Frank Drake Leaves a Legacy of Searching for Voices in the Void
Frank Drake, founder of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
(SETI), poses for a portrait at his home in Aptos, Calif., on February
27, 2015. Credit: Ramin Rahimian for the Washington Post via Getty Images
Frank Drake, the eminent radio astronomer who performed the first search
for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) around other stars in 1960,
died on Friday at his home near Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 92 years old.
His daughter, science journalist Nadia Drake, shared the news on her
website. “A titan in life,” she wrote, “Dad leaves a titanic absence.”

“Frank founded an entire field,” says astrophysicist Andrew Siemion,
director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) at the University
of California, Berkeley. “He played a crucial role in creating the
framework through which we can apply the tools of astronomy and physics
to understanding and answering existential questions. But he never lost
his humility and generosity. When our descendants look back centuries
from now, I think they’ll rank Frank among the greatest scientists who
ever lived.”

Paul Horowitz, a physicist and Harvard University professor emeritus,
whom Drake guided into the field in the 1970s, recalls him as “a
wonderful, gentle giant in SETI.... Often scientists are competitive,
backbiting and extremely protective of their turf. Frank was the exact
opposite of all of that—just totally exemplary in the selfless way he
practiced science.”

Born in Chicago on May 28, 1930, Drake grew up in the city’s South Shore
neighborhood. His father, a chemical engineer, and his mother, a
homemaker, were not devout, but they raised Drake and his two younger
siblings in strict accordance with Baptist fundamentalism. He later said
this gave him a greater appreciation for different ways of life and
being—and a lifelong aversion to organized religion. Neither of his
parents “seemed to have any idea of how to have fun—at least in my
opinion,” he recalled in a 1992 memoir he co-authored with science
writer Dava Sobel. Drake’s interest in extraterrestrial life began at
age eight, sparked by his imaginings of alien Earths scattered across
the universe after his father told him ours was not the only world in
space. He nurtured that spark with occasional visits to the Museum of
Science and Industry, just blocks from his family’s church.

Drake graduated from Cornell University in 1952 with an engineering
physics degree. Under the Navy’s ROTC program, he then served three
years as an electronics officer onboard a heavy cruiser, the U.S.S.
Albany. As a graduate student and Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University
from 1955 to 1958, he studied radio astronomy under the tutelage of
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a trailblazing astrophysicist renowned for
correctly proposing that stars were mostly made of hydrogen and helium.
After obtaining his Ph.D., Drake took a staff astronomer position at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, W.V., where
his scientific career truly began.

Drake’s hunt for electromagnetic transmissions from cosmic civilizations
catapulted him to global fame, but it was far from being his only
significant work. He also made the first radio map of the Milky Way’s
center and co-discovered regions of seething radiation around Jupiter
that are analogous to Earth’s Van Allen belts. Drake was among the first
to measure the temperature and density of Venus’s broiling atmosphere.
His numerous official appointments included serving as director of the
Puerto Rico–based Arecibo Observatory, which was the world’s largest
radio telescope for decades. And throughout his working life, he taught
and mentored generations of younger researchers. Outside of science, his
interests included wine making, lapidary work and orchid cultivation.

Drake’s three most remarkable research achievements stem from a period
of SETI-related productivity from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s.

The first came in 1960, when he used the NRAO’s 85-foot-wide dish in
Green Bank to seek radio signals from any talkative aliens in the
vicinity of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, two of our nearest and most
sunlike neighboring stars. Drake called the two-month effort Project
Ozma, after The Wizard of Oz series of children’s books, because both
concerned fantastical faraway lands inhabited by exotic beings. Although
decades earlier inventor Nikola Tesla and physicist Guglielmo Marconi
had both independently tried to tune in to alien radio broadcasts, those
comparatively crude observations concerned putative Martians—not
denizens of distant planetary systems—making Ozma the first-ever
“modern” SETI campaign. It produced no evidence of extraterrestrials,
though a signal from a high-altitude aircraft did once set off a false
alarm, the first of many for the then nascent field.

“If you look at today’s radio SETI experiments, they’re all still doing
Project Ozma,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI
Institute in Mountain View, Calif., where Drake worked for more than a
quarter-century until he retired in 2010. “They’re doing it with
enormously better equipment and with many more targets, but the
experiment itself is to look for narrowband signals coming from the sky.
And that was Frank’s idea.”

Drake’s second landmark contribution came scarcely a year after Project
Ozma, amid an invitation-only gathering of elite scientists in November
1961 to discuss SETI’s prospects. Opening the meeting, Drake unveiled an
equation to estimate the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky
Way. The equation’s seven interlinked factors were an ascending scale of
ever greater unknowns, ranging from well-constrained estimates of
star-formation rates to educated guesses about the prevalence of
habitable planets to wild speculations about the number of life-bearing
worlds and the longevity of technological cultures. He had concocted it
as a way of guiding the three-day meeting’s agenda, hoping to enlist the
attendees (who included a young postdoctoral researcher named Carl
Sagan) to help hone its values. But his so-called Drake equation also
became a dominant force shaping all future SETI efforts—as well as a
potent reflection of our own Earth-bound biases and assumptions about
the nature of life and intelligence in the wider cosmos.

“It has stood the test of time,” Drake told the author of this article
in a 2011 interview. “I’ve never had to change the factors, although
I’ve tweaked some of their definitions. And I’ve gotten many suggestions
for adding other factors to it—like one for politicians.”

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Drake’s third signature feat came in 1974, after his rising star led him
to a tenure-track position at Cornell University—as well as the
directorship of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, which
managed the Arecibo Observatory. After overseeing three years of work
that boosted the giant dish’s sensitivity and gave it a powerful new
radar system, during a November 1974 opening ceremony, Drake used the
facility to transmit a radio signal toward M13—a star cluster more than
22,000 light-years away. Encoded in the transmission’s 1,679 frequency
pulses was Drake’s “Arecibo message.” This series of pictograms
detailed, among other things, the double-helix structure of DNA, the
dimensions of the human form and the location of Earth within the solar
system. The transmission lasted less than three minutes, but at its
specific wavelength, it outshone the sun by a factor of 100,000—offering
a shred of hope that somehow, somewhere someone out there might detect
and decipher it. The Arecibo Observatory’s 1,000-foot-wide dish (big
enough, Drake once calculated, to hold 350 million boxes of cornflakes)
tragically collapsed in late 2020 amid allegations of underfunding and
neglect. It may yet be rebuilt. But even if not, its epochal
transmission will continue to ceaselessly travel through the void.

The Arecibo message was Drake’s farthest-reaching attempt at
interstellar signaling, but it was neither the first nor the last time
he was involved in such work. Collaborating with Sagan and Sagan’s then
wife 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
woman, as well as a cosmic map intended to trace the probes’ origins
back to Earth. This became the first physical message to be sent out of
the solar system. In 1977, alongside Sagan and novelist Ann Druyan (who
would later marry Sagan), as well as artist Jon Lomberg and science
writer Timothy Ferris, Drake helped design the Voyager golden record.
This interstellar “message in a bottle,” packed with a curated
collection of sights, sounds and greetings from Earth, was launched
onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 probes.