![]() ![]() He named the experiment Project Ozma, after the princess in L. So he designed an experiment to search for signals coming from worlds that could be orbiting the nearby stars Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. GREEN BANK TELESCOPE TVHis logic made sense: For the last century, Earthlings have been making these sorts of announcements all the time in the form of TV and radio broadcasts, military radar, and other communications that leak into space. First lightĪstronomers knew of no worlds beyond our solar system back in the 1960s, but Drake reasoned that if planets like Earth orbited stars like the sun, then those worlds might be populated by civilizations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos. It wasn’t until I began working as a science journalist that I realized just how risky and revolutionary Dad's early work really was. I was never bitten by the academic astronomy bug, though. GREEN BANK TELESCOPE FULLMy early memories are full of trips to observatories and conferences, and the singular pleasure of staring through telescopes at the twinkling sky. Humble and curious, with a knack for quiet mischief, Dad is committed to his science, still writing research papers and serving on committees. ![]() But for my dad, it was worth taking a risk to find out if the cosmos is as richly populated as Earth’s teeming oceans-or if humanity is adrift in a profoundly quiet interstellar expanse. “Searching for intelligent life was considered bad science in those days,” says Drake, who just turned 90 years old-and is better known to me as Dad.Īt the time, looking for evidence of alien technologies was still squarely in the camp of schlocky science fiction. For such a grand quest, he had a budget of $2,000 and access to a radio telescope thought to be sensitive enough to detect transmissions from any potentially broadcasting extraterrestrials. In the spring of 1960, a 29-year-old astronomer with streaks of preternaturally white hair and a devil-may-care attitude set out to tackle one of humanity’s most existential questions: Are we alone in the universe?įrank Drake, then an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, was gearing up to search for radio whispers from faraway civilizations that might be sailing the cosmic sea. ![]()
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