The Drake Equation
Is that his new album? No. Not really. The Drake equation which was written in 1961 by Frank Drake is used to calculate how many civilizations could exist in our milky way galaxy. In Copernicus’ lifetime, most believed that Earth held its place at the center of the universe. The sun, the stars, and all of the planets revolved around it. The term used to refer to this idea is ‘Copernican principle”. So much for a dethroned principle. The earth pretty is a unique planet in a unique universe. Or is it?
You see, it was just 11 years ago, when astronomers suddenly realized that the universe was not merely expanding but accelerating in its expansion from Earth or our galaxy(The milky way): roughly speaking, putting Earth, or at least our galaxy, at the center of the observable universe.
“The universe has 10 million, million, million suns (10 followed by 18 zeros) similar to our own. One in a million has planets around it. Only one in a million million has the right combination of chemicals, temperature, water, days and nights to support planetary life as we know it. This calculation arrives at the estimated figure of 100 million worlds where life has been forged by evolution.”, says Harvard University astronomy professor Harlow Shapley two months after physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article in the journal Nature with the title “Searching for Interstellar Communications”. In this article, they argued that radio telescopes had become sensitive enough to pick up transmissions that might be broadcast into space by civilizations orbiting other stars. Seven months later, Dr Drake would make the first systematic search for signals from communicative extraterrestrial civilizations which would get him started on the Drake equation not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations, but as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
However, within the limits of our existing technology, any practical search for distant intelligent life must necessarily be a search for some manifestation of a distant technology. After about 50 years, the Drake equation is still of seminal importance because it is a ‘road map’ of what we need to learn in order to solve this fundamental existential question.
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