Remembering Frank Drake, who led science in listening for an extraterrestrial “whisper we can’t quite hear”
Frank Drake, the eminent radio astronomer who in 1960 performed the first search for extraterrestrial intelligence around other stars, died Friday at his home near Santa Cruz, California. He was 92. His daughter, science journalist Nadia Drake, shared the news on her website. “A titan in life,” she wrote, “Dad leaves a titanic absence.”
Drake graduated from Cornell University in 1952 with an engineering degree. Under the Navy’s ROTC program, he then served three years as an electronics officer aboard the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Albany. As a graduate student and PhD candidate at Harvard University from 1955 to 1958, he studied radio astronomy under the tutelage of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the trailblazing astrophysicist renowned for correctly proposing that stars were mostly made of hydrogen and helium.
“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, California, 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.
The Arecibo Message was Drake’s farthest reaching attempt at interstellar signaling, but 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 included illustrations of a nude man and woman, as well as a cosmic map intended to trace the probes’ origins back to Earth.
“Personally, I find nothing more tantalizing than the thought that radio messages from alien civilizations in space are passing through our offices and homes, right now, like a whisper we can’t quite hear,” Drake wrote with typical understated gusto in the preface to his 1992 memoir.
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