Please Call Earth. We Still Haven’t Found You.

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: March 2, 2008

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, except for Pluto, and radio astronomers have listened for intelligent signals from more than 1,000 stars, so far in vain. Last month, a scaled-down version of our own solar system, with a pair of planets analogous to Jupiter and Saturn, was found orbiting a star 5,000 light years away in the constellation Scorpius, bringing the total number of known exoplanets, as they are called, to more than 250.

You might think we have made some headway in solving the equation, or rewriting it, or generally getting a handle on our cosmic loneliness. But you would be wrong. Astronomers today are as fuzzily optimistic (or pessimistic) as the Green Bank group.

“I get that question all the time,” said Dr. Drake, 76, by phone from his office at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., where he is chairman emeritus and director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe. “There hasn’t been any great change. The equation still stands.”

The discoveries of the last half-century, he explained, have confirmed what were just educated guesses on the part of the Dolphins.

Full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/weekinreview/02overbye.html?scp=1&sq=overbye&st=nyt