‘You are not alone.’ — Michael Jackson
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, (…) so far in vain. (…)
At the same time, scientists discovered that life on Earth was tougher and more versatile than scientists had thought, thriving in weird places like boiling undersea vents. (…) How often does intelligent and technological life actually emerge from such environments? Some evolutionists, like Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, have argued that intelligence is not inevitable. The dinosaurs did just fine for 150 million years without getting appreciably brainier.
The advantages intelligence and technology confer, moreover, might also be outweighed by their dangers.
previously { The Voyager program | Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a golden record that contains pictures and sounds of Earth, along with symbolic directions for playing the record and data detailing the location of Earth. The record is intended as a combination time capsule and interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future human, that recovers either of the Voyager craft. }
