From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Mon Mar 03 2008 - 13:35:42 PST
Please Call Earth. We Still Haven’t Found You.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: March 2, 2008
NEARLY half a century ago, Frank Drake, a young radio astronomer with
extraterrestrials on his mind, stepped up to a blackboard in Green Bank,
W.Va., and scribbled a string of symbols intended to bring some clarity to
the question of just how alone humanity is in the cosmos.
The dozen wise men (there were no women) in the room were an elite group.
Among them were Carl Sagan of Cornell University, as yet relatively unknown;
the biochemist Melvin Calvin, who would learn during the meeting that he had
won the Nobel Prize in chemistry; Barney Oliver, the research chief of
Hewlett-Packard; and John Lilly, the dolphin expert, in whose honor the
group dubbed themselves the Order of the Dolphin.
They sifted the variables in the light of what was then known or guessed,
did the math, and concluded that there could be from less than a thousand to
a billion other civilizations in the galaxy.
The Drake Equation, as it is known, has served as the bones of the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and for the hopeful field of
astrobiology ever since.
Since that meeting, in 1961, spacecraft have surveyed all the major bodies
of the solar system, except for Pluto, and radio astronomers have listened
for intelligent signals from more than 1,000 stars, so far in vain. Last
month, a scaled-down version of our own solar system, with a pair of planets
analogous to Jupiter and Saturn, was found orbiting a star 5,000 light years
away in the constellation Scorpius, bringing the total number of known
exoplanets, as they are called, to more than 250.
You might think we have made some headway in solving the equation, or
rewriting it, or generally getting a handle on our cosmic loneliness. But
you would be wrong. Astronomers today are as fuzzily optimistic (or
pessimistic) as the Green Bank group.
“I get that question all the time,” said Dr. Drake, 76, by phone from his
office at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., where he is chairman
emeritus and director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the
Universe. “There hasn’t been any great change. The equation still stands.”
The discoveries of the last half-century, he explained, have confirmed what
were just educated guesses on the part of the Dolphins.
Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/weekinreview/02overbye.html?scp=1&sq=overbye&st=nyt
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