Frank Drake May 28, 1930 to September 2, 2022

For me it is big bang theory TV series. The Three Geeky Guys star used something called the Drake Equation to calculate the odds of accomplishing the highly improbable thing of finding a girlfriend.

An astrophysicist’s inner circle of humor was that the Drake equation was actually devised to calculate the likelihood of another unlikely event: intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. Possibility of finding a body. I loved the jokes.

Frank Drake, the American astronomer who devised the famous equation, has died at his home in Aptos, California. He was 92 years old. Drake has nearly launched a modern scientific enterprise known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). It was such a pleasure to shoot with him one afternoon about 20 years ago.

His scientific achievements were groundbreaking and brave. The very idea of ​​trying to reach out to aliens was considered ridiculous by many scientists in the 1960s when he started.

However, Frank was not deterred and used, for example, a radio telescope to send messages to extraterrestrials who might be listening. And the act itself was controversial: our ET friends saw the message as an invitation to dinner, and some thought it might inspire that special day like humanity and nature. There was

Frank was also listening to the skies, looking for greetings his galactic neighbor might have sent. But perhaps his most famous cosmic his communiqué was a message engraved on a metal plate attached to the side of the Pioneer spacecraft. NASA launched these spacecraft in his early 1970s, but they are now out of the solar system, exploring the infinite depths of space in a message-carrying style in a communication bottle that Frank helped design. I am traveling.

There were pros and cons to this. The plate had an image of a man and a woman, both naked. For scientists, this was merely a realistic depiction. It is commonly known that NASA was sending pornography to aliens. Censorship was involved and the male genitalia were evaluated, but the female genitalia had to be airbrushed out before takeoff. Heaven forbid we offend aliens.

Frank had a mischievous sense of humor. A few years ago, when I spoke to his daughter Nadia, she told me he was famous for his photobombs. He looked at the shoot and casually saw a crab walking in the background.