Interview with Frank Drake
By, Richard Thieme

RT: Since Project Ozma, you have been working with SETI or projects like it for forty years. So – at this point in time – what do you think?

FD: Let me make two comments. One is the scientific data supporting the idea that there’s a lot of life in space. That has grown a huge amount in forty years. We knew nothing about the origin of life, nothing about other planetary systems, it was all speculative or conclusions were drawn from circumstantial evidence – that there would be planetary systems, for example, but there was no direct detections whatsoever or even close to it. The idea that there is life in space has been broadly supported by all of that. The question of the abundance of intelligent technology-using life is still an open question and quite controversial. Given the huge number of stars and the abundance of planetary systems, there is no doubt that there are other technology-using creatures in space, but how rare they are and how easy they are to find still is an open question and controversial. So all we can do is take what we know about the universe and from that deduce as best we can the best thing to search for. Forty years ago that was radio waves and that’s still true today. That story has not changed. Radio waves are the most promising for a number of scientific and technical reasons. Now recently we added optical searches and that’s because we’ve recognized that technology is capable of producing detectable optical technical signals. The circumstances are much more demanding with the radio which makes one much more pessimistic about detecting optical signals. On the other hand, the equipment to do it is much less expensive and much less complicated so that in a way counterbalances the obstacles to successful optical communication across space. I’m getting to your question, are we doing the right thing? We are doing the right thing in our radio searches and also in our optical searches in our present limited state, we’re doing the right thing, but we’re not doing nearly enough of it, and this is where the public and even the scientific community does not really understand the situation.

RT: Enough of it ... well, there’s collection and processing.

FD: I mean primarily the collection of the signal. We aren’t applying enough resources. The amount of resources is trivial compared to whatever else we do in space science much less biology and other sciences, so we have looked at very few stars on very few channels. On most of our searches – this sounds like a criticism, which it is – its not that people are stupid - in many of our searches the data follow-up is totally inadequate. In all of the searches except ours, data is taken but it’s not analyzed until long afterward by which I mean days, months, even a year, and where a candidate signal is detected, the obvious procedure is to look again, and when you do that you don’t find anything. This leaves you with an inconclusive result, and it’s very frustrating, because some of those signals may truly be the real signals. There are a lot of very plausible scenarios where real signals will be transient, and what this says is not only do you have to search many stars on many channels, you must have an immediate and very effective follow-up.

RT: It’s not just looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s looking for a quantum needle that jumps around.

FD: That’s right. You may have to look at the same frequency and the same star many many times before you hit pay dirt.

RT: You said (in a talk to SCO) when there is a signal and it’s not there the next time, it’s a local signal. And that you are excited about expanding resources using smaller equipment....

FD: That’s happened, and it’s big step in the right direction. You can see it at the web site. The project called the Allen Array Telescope after Paul Allen who has supported us as have Gordon Moore and others. It looks to be the wave of the future in radio telescope building – a large number of small antennas connected together through computer systems to duplicate the performance of large antennae, but even better, you can synthesize beams looking at different parts of the sky, many at once, so it’s an improvement over the traditional telescope. The goal is a collecting array of one hectare, that’s ten thousand square meters, the 1HT is the same telescope but renamed after Allen who contributed 25 million dollars, which for us is big time. Nathan Myrvold from Microsoft is contributing one million to build the control building for this telescope. That’s a tremendous advance. It is not as much collecting area as Arecibo but we’re already talking about making it 3HT which would not cost much more and would be bigger than Arecibo. Another advantage of this design is you can expand it without having to rebuild what you’ve done. The cost of adding collecting area is proportionate to the size. So the ATA is in progress and it will allow us to observe all of the time, we only have 20 days a year at Arecibo, that’s all we can get, which is not much at all, and it’s worse than that- we observe at six months intervals and the equipment is turned off between times, so it it’s tropical and humid and we have to send people down a month ahead of time, nothing works, and there’s a tremendous amount of redundant or duplicated effort because we keep having to start this thing, altering it because the observatories have altered the computer interface. So having our own telescope will buy us that much time and it will optimize the telescope to keep it running on optimum mode, this version can construct many beams which means we can run in effect many telescopes at once. We’re limited only by money, there has to be a spectrum analyzer for each beam which are about half a million dollars each.

As to the SETI-at-home project, the public enthusiasm is terrific, they’re overwhelmed, it’s a good thing, but they use Arecibo and have no control of where they look at the sky, and as I mentioned they have no ability to look immediately at a candidate signal.

RT: Say that you do find an anomalous signal. What determines a hit?

FD: With SETI-at-Home, the Harvard project, they have trouble because it may not be there when they go back even if it was real. In our case, we lived with this frustration for years. We’re fortunate in having recruited early on some wealthy generous people from Silicon Valley who provided enough money for us to solve that problem. We do it with a combination of techniques. We do have an operator present at all times so that any time we see a candidate signal, identified automatically by the computer, we immediately re-observe. If the signal is still there, the really conclusive thing we can do that no one else can afford to do is we have a second telescope at Jodrell Bank running at all times so all local interference will not be seen by both telescopes. Transmissions from spacecraft may be seen by both and they tend to be in specific frequency bands so red flags come up. There’s another test which is definitive and it’s more technical using the Doppler effect. We measure the frequency very precisely using a narrow bandwidth of one hertz on frequencies of many millions of hertz so any velocity of the transmitter will create an enormous Doppler effect that’s hundreds of channels and the useful part is, if we’re observing something deep in space, the Doppler effect observed by the two telescopes will not only be different but will change. The earth is rotating so each telescope will have a speed toward the signal source that is different for each telescope. So they’ll see different Doppler effects and a change that is detectable in a couple of seconds because of the narrow frequency band. From the geographical location of the telescopes and where we’re looking, we can calculate the Doppler effect immediately as to the source, in the solar system or in the stars. We know with certainty if the signal source is nearby or not. We have no inconclusives, no unexplained candidates, and so far all of the signals are ours.

RT: I am thinking of the movie Contact. Say you have a signal. What’s next? What would prevent people from believing its a shared hallucination, and if you convince people ... then what? You’re left saying, we have had this experience but ... how do you respond? What do you do with the evidence?

FD: We have thousands of scenarios. As you recognize, the first problem is acquiring the signal, the second part is doing something useful with the signal. The likelihood is that we will first know we have a signal but will not be able to extract any information from it. That would be true of radar sending pulses or a navigation beacon. You learn nothing from that other than that it exists. We have some nightmare scenarios. One is that we’ll get a nicely coded digital transmission that turns out to be purchase orders in an unknown language. Big news, but we have no idea what it means. Even worse is that some of the most prevalent signals will be the messages you find on the radio at night, evangelical broadcasters proselytizing like Oral Roberts or heavy metal rock music.

RT: It’s hard enough just a few hundred years away from the European middle ages to think of talking to people from that culture, that time and place on earth. That would hold for other civilizations too, of course, wouldn’t it?

FD: It’s far worse than that. Not only are we dealing with creatures that are entirely different than ourselves, with different philosophies and languages, the probability is very high that they’re millions or billions of years ahead of us and are talking about things that as Arthur C. Clarke said look to us like magic and we don’t even know what the magic is.

RT: There are people in our own society who think this world is magical.

FD: Like cargo cults. That’s the way we might look to them. Now, there is a solution to this, which we dream might happen, which is that we intercept television in a form that we understand well enough to construct the pictures, that way we can learn languages too. But the messages will, as you say, be thousands of years old, so we’ll be doing the archaeology of the future, receiving from a civilization as it was thousands of years ago but which is now thousands of years ahead of where it was.

RT: Are these issues some of the reasons why it’s difficult to get back into government budgets?

FD: No, we’re not in any government budgets, but that has to do with confusing what we do with pseudo science, UFOs, psychics, abduction stories and such. There were people (fortunately not any more) in Congress who thought they would be subject to ridicule if they provided funding for something like it was searching for UFOs or little green men walking the earth.

RT: Ridicule is number one –

FD: Yep.

RT: Once you have destroyed the credibility of a domain, it’s difficult to become credible again.

FD: You raise suspicions. They’re not easy to dismiss, they hang around.

RT: To you and Carl Sagan and myself, I am thinking of my excitement in the seventies when I was watching signals from the first Viking lander paint that Martian desert on the screen of a video ham—given the way life seems to be, if it can happen it will happen.

FD: That’s right.

RT: So the likelihood is that life is ubiquitous. And this is exciting and we can conceive it and begin by taking baby steps. So what is the source of this resistance?

FD: The only place you find profound resistance is the U.S. Congress. The public at large has tremendous enthusiasm. Look at the 2 ½ million people who subscribe to SETI-at-home. We get gifts from thousands of people each year and attaboy messages and people we never heard about leave us money in their wills. So there is tremendous support in the general public and people on average contribute more to this effort than to many other things to which they contribute.

RT: About your fears that SETI will be linked to UFO phenomena ... people like Peter Sturrock at Stanford think UFOs ought to be the subject of scientific investigation, at the least ... there is frustration because Sturrock and others believe the domain is worthy of inquiry and expect to receive an open-minded response. But they don’t.

FD: There is an explanation for that. The whole subject has been tainted by charlatans.

RT: That whole cottage industry.

FD: That whole cottage industry that is very active. Some of its practitioners are very expert at bamboozling the public which as a result has created an aura of suspicion around any of that activity. We know, our big donors tell us, the worst thing that can happen to them is to contribute to something and find out it’s a sham or a fraud. So given the fact that funding for such things is a discretionary thing, they say, why take a chance if it might end up embarrassing me? It’s the effect of unfortunately a long history of fraud and deception around the subject that keeps it from being studied. It does deserve study because I’ve had the same experience you’ve had, I’ve talked to a lot of people who had these experiences, they’re embarrassed even to talk about it, they don’t want their names used but they truly believe it happened to them and if what happened to them is as they described, it was a very big deal. Now, my read is, maybe it did happen. I’m agnostic. But I think there are psychological phenomena that explain a lot, maybe all of it, it’s not well understood.

RT: I stay away from crop circles, abductions –

FD: That’s nonsense.

RT: But commercial airline pilot reports like the several thousand compiled by Richard Haines’ –

FD: Yes. Well, there are real physical phenomena too like sprites. There are things that have never been adequately introduced to this picture. One is something most people have not heard of called transient global amnesia which explains almost every abduction report, I think – the statistics are just right for that. About one in two thousand has the experience, they have 5-8 hours where all short term memory ceases and it’s never recovered. It happens once and never again, they’re normal before and after, this accounts for “missing time.” Statistically that would explain just about all the abduction reports. Sleep paralysis is real too. There are unusual and rare psychological events that happen in perfectly normal people that explains a lot of it, but of course we don’t know if it explains all of it.

RT: It’s imperative then that you maintain the integrity of the program –

FD: We look at funding very carefully. We have to be absolutely impeccable, more than any other organization, and we try very hard to do that.

RT: Carl Sagan – his views changed over his lifetime, didn’t they?

FD: He was as a young man very speculative and he made some speculations that were really totally indefensible and came back to haunt him in later years. Some senior scientists never forgot that and held it against him through his whole life. But the last 15 years of his life he was rock-solid sober scientist and didn’t make any speculation that wasn’t reasonable scientifically. He also would admit when he was wrong which some people don’t. He was a wonderful communicator and we miss him. We need another one like that and there isn’t another one. But they’ll emerge. Before Sagan was Loren Eisely, one of the most beautiful writers there ever was.

RT: You are the author, of course, of the famous Drake Equation, a formula for estimating the probability of life on other worlds. Would you do anything differently in how you formulated that? Such as the weight of the variables?

FD: If I were to do it again today, I would end up with the same equation. People always write to say, you need to add this or that, but they’re all subsumed by what’s already there. Like the number of Congresses that will be supportive, a P for political. No, it hasn’t changed, it’s still a good factor. Every factor is equally important and they’re all in there to the first power. The equation gives us guidance as to what we need to know about, for example, how to build a radio telescope. Some factors are much more uncertain than others, and that has changed. I thought the fraction t - about intelligence was nearly 1 and that’s being challenged by an eminent paleontologists, but others say no, given enough time, we’ll get tool using and intelligence. But we only have our own fossil experience to use. The other is the L factor and students always suggest numbers which when averaged yield a large number. L is the mean of the detectable lifetime of a civilization and if only a few are very long-lived and transmit for a long time, they dominate the whole thing and you end with a very large L even if it’s only a few per cent of extra-solar civilizations. Most important, it tells us what we really need to know that’s important.

RT: Are you familiar with the work of Hal Puthoff and his work on the zero energy field? or on propulsion systems that are faster than light “inside the plasma bubble?”

FD: NASA has funded a number of groups to explore extracting energy from the vacuum and stuff like that, he’s one of them, and most of this is totally off-the-wall stuff but NASA provides funding for it. The Puthoff stuff is based on some real experiments, people who claim to be experts say it’s real, but it’s so esoteric it’s hard to tell, they say, yeah, there’s energy there, but you can’t extract nearly enough even to lift a paperclip off the table.

RT: When knowledge is so specialized, it’s difficult to evaluate the statements of others.

FD: Yes, I have that problem with some domains.

RT: Me too. I have that problem with lots of domains.

– January 8, 2001

Frank Drake was born in Chicago on May 28, 1930 to Richard and Winifred Drake. Raised in Chicago's South Shore with sister, Alma, and brother, Robert, he had a fairly typical childhood.

Always interested in science, he and his friends would spend hours experimenting with motors, radios, and chemistry sets. As his understanding of astronomy and the actual size of the universe grew he began to wonder about the possibility of the existence of other planets and life on those planets. The idea seemed reasonable to him. However, because of the religious convictions of his parents and teachers he never felt comfortable bringing up the subject of extraterrestrial life.

After high school Drake enrolled at Cornell on an ROTC scholarship to study electronics. It was here that he fell in love with astronomy and finally found someone else who was considering the possibilities of life on other planets.In 1951, during his junior year he attended a lecture by Otto Struve, one of the world's preeminent astrophysicists. Towards the end of a lecture Struve showed that there was mounting evidence that planetary systems had most likely formed around half of the stars in the galaxy. Struve went on to state that life could certainly exist on some of those planets. Finally, Drake had found someone who shared his ideas.

After college he spent the next three years with the Navy to repay his scholarship.Thanks to his electronics degree he ended up as the electronics officer on the USS Albany where he gained invaluable experience operating and fixing the latest high tech electronic equipment. When his Navy tour ended, Drake headed to Harvard graduate school to study optical astronomy. Fortunately, the only summer position available was in radio astronomy. Because of his electronics experience in the Navy he was a natural fit because the radio astronomy equipment was constantly in need of tweaking and repair. Drake got hooked on radio astronomy and never looked back. Upon finishing graduate school in 1958 he got a position at the newly founded National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. It was here in 1960 that the first search took place. Named Project Ozma by Drake, the search was a two week observation of the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.

At one point during the search a false alarm, which turned out to be a terrestrial signal, caused some excitement. Other than that no signals were detected. Hardly expecting to find evidence of advanced civilizations on the first try the searchers were not disappointed by the result, but were encouraged because the search had finally begun.In 1961 Drake and J. Peter Pearman, an officer on the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences, organized the first SETI conference. The three day meeting, held at the NRAO, was a small gathering of a dozen or so scientists who had shown an interest in SETI. It was in preparation for this conference that Drake came up with the now famous Drake Equation:

N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL

The purpose of the equation was to help focus the conference attendees' attention on the crucial questions that needed to be answered in order to determine the chances of SETI's success.

In 1963 Drake took a short-lived position at the Jet Propulsion Lab and later that year he took a position at Cornell's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. Two years later he accepted the directorship of the Cornell run Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

BACK