In the article, “Humans Eventually Will Encounter Alien Life” by David Haugen and Zack Lewis, astronomer Frank Drake is interviewed on the search for extraterrestrial life. The Drake equation and the organization (SETI) are also discussed.
Finding alien life seems almost a certainty. At least, that 's what astronomer Frank Drake, creator of the Drake equation, thinks. The Drake equation, created by its namesake, is a formula to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. Frank Drake is also the founder of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) which is a collaborative project working towards making contact with intelligent alien life forms. The organization first started its search over fifty years ago, but hasn 't found a signal yet. In the interview, Drake discusses how the discovery of several exoplanets (or extrasolar planet, meaning a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun) and the discovery of oceans in strange places like Europa (one of Jupiter 's largest
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Murray states how if you assume nothing is special about our solar system then you come up with optimistic numbers, and how astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan suggest there could be as many as ten million civilizations as advanced or more advanced than us in the galaxy today. But, according to Murray this begs an important question brought up by Enrico Fermi an Italian physicist back in 1950. Fermi asked “Where is everybody?”. Murray then goes on to say if communicating life is common then why is there no evidence of it? He thinks that the galaxy has been around plenty long enough for probes and other signals to have reached us by now. He also states that most physicists agree we have the capabilities to pick up alien signals. However, he doesn 't bring up that while we might have the capability to pick up their signals it doesn 't necessarily mean that we will because of the numerous complications that come with searching for these