SETI founder convinced ET life exists

Frank Drake is the founder of SETI, which stands for “Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” He is an American researcher and astrophysicist who developed an intense interest in the possibility of life existing in other parts of the universe after sitting in on a lecture in 1951 that was given by Otto Struve.
Drake is well respected in the scientific community, and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. After studying the topic for all of these years, he is still quite convinced that extraterrestrial life does indeed exist. He was interviewed recently by Hannah Devlin.

Hannah Devlin: What has SETI learnt over the past 50 years?

Frank Drake: In our search for extraterrestrial life we are guided by our own experience of technology. At the same time, our knowledge of technology in some ways limits us. We might be ignoring technologies that are not appreciated or understood by us. Optical searches are the new thing. We’ve just started in the past few years and we’re using our own lasers as a model. Very powerful lasers have been developed for use in fusion reactors — these petawatt pulses create a flash of light that could outshine a star for one billionth of a second.

HD: According to the Drake equation, how many civilizations could we expect to be within observable distance?

FD: Without being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic 10,000 is the working number for the number of detectable civilizations. That corresponds to only one in 10 million stars, with the nearest about 1,000 light years away. We’ve not even come close to searching the necessary number of stars — we’ve searched several thousand, not several million and only searched a small part of the spectrum. That we’ve not found anything yet doesn’t tell us anything apart from that our estimates are not wrong beyond our wildest dreams.

For the full interview, click here.