Looking For Life, Part I

FRANK DRAKE, astronomer famous for spending his life searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe, died last week, one of those deaths which rekindles poignant childhood memories among those with similar imterests. In the nineteen fifties radio telescopes were all the rage, and the first really big ones went into operation. Almost immediately they provided a plethora of information about the nature of nature. Drake, then a young scientist, began popularizing the notion that humanity might be able to verify the existence of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations by using the telescopes to search for organized electromagnetic signals incoming from space, an ideaa which took hold, but only on a limited basis. Valuable telescope time is too precious to allot too much of it to quizotic searches destined to failure, after all. When people suggested that it might be more profitable to simply send signals into outer space from Earth, and await any resposes, Drake dismissed the idea as unnecessary; he pointed out that every year episodes of "I Love Lucy" were already "rocketing" ever deeper into the cosmos, and that any extraterrestrial species worth its weight in Barney Fife's shirt pocket bullet would indisputably be able to recognize television reruns as being the product of intelligent beings, if not beings with good taste in entertainment. Drake was famous for his equation predicting the probable number of planets in the universe harboring life; even under the least prolific scenarios, (and Drake always usesd the most conservative estimates), the number was, and remains, staggeringly huge. The equation, for those wishing to continue Drake's searh, is: R x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fi x Fc x L = N . All the little exes simply refer to multiplication, as always. The "R" stands for "rate at which stars are formed", "Fp" means the fraction of stars with planets orbiting them, "Ne" means number or stars with Earth-like planets, "Fl" means fraction of planets with life, then "Fi" stands for fraction of planets with intelligent life, followed by planets with communicative life, able and willing to reach out to talk to other species, "L" stands for length of time a given species is able to communicate, and "N", is the final answer, the likely number of planets harboring intellligent, talkative, life. It runs out that, with the known number of galaxies, stars and planets in the universe, that if you simply "do the math" as we like to say, there should be billions of talkative people in the cosmos, even assuming the most conservative, life-barren circumstances. Its fun to plug in any numbers you choose, then have at it.