SETI pioneer Frank Drake, of Drake equation fame, passes away at 92

Astronomer Frank Drake, who pioneered the modern search for intelligent life in the universe, passed away on 2 September at the age of 92. Drake is best known for the equation that bears his name, a formula that estimates how many detectable alien societies may exist within our Milky Way. Drake devised his famous equation in 1961, a year after he initiated Project Ozma at Green Bank Observatory, which used a radio telescope to hunt for possible signals from extraterrestrial civilisations.

“His strategy is still enthusiastically deployed six decades after his pioneering SETI experiment. This is a truly remarkable circumstance, and nearly unprecedented in exploration,” radio astronomer Seth Shostak wrote in a 2020 tribute to Drake, for many years a colleague of his at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. In that tribute, Shostak stressed how tough it was for Drake to blaze his trail. Drake had to battle through the giggle factor, which discouraged pretty much every other scientist from even voicing an interest in SETI. “It was a taboo subject in astronomy,” Drake told Shostak. “Nobody else was doing a search, because they were all afraid. I was too dumb to be afraid.” The giggle factor has been melting away recently, thanks in part to Drake and the people he inspired, several generations of astronomers whose ranks include Seth Shostak and Jill Tarter. Scientific discoveries have also helped pull SETI off the fringes and into the mainstream, chief among them the finds of the ongoing exoplanet revolution.

Drake was born on 28 May 1930 in Chicago. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Cornell University and a master’s and a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard. Drake was an astronomy professor at Cornell from 1964 to 1984, then held a similar post at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) from 1984 to 1996. He stayed on as an emeritus professor at UCSC after that. Drake also directed the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe and chaired the institute’s board of trustees. Among many other distinctions and responsibilities, he was a member of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and he also chaired the US National Research Council’s Board of Physics and Astronomy from 1989 to 1992.