Frank Drake Quotes

Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens' emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.

The one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals.

But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up.

In 1959 the University recognized our work by appointing me to a new Chair of Radio Astronomy.

Our television transmitters leak out from the Earth. And actually, there's a sphere surrounding the Earth from the earliest television signals, maybe 70 years ago, that's going out one light year per year. But it's really weak.

I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.

The Next Generation Space Telescope, which will be located much further away from the Earth than the Hubble Space Telescope presently is, will also explore the infrared part of the spectrum.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

We don't know how to identify intelligence over interstellar distances, so what we do instead is use technology for a proxy.

A radio telescope pointing at the sky receives radiation not only from space, but also from other sources including the ground, the earth's atmosphere, and the components of the radio telescope itself.

That is one of the things that has come out of the discovery of pulsars - more knowledge about the space between the stars.

Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal.

My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.

The pulsar map is not dangerous at all. It will likely never even be seen by extraterrestrials.

In 1957, I was studying the Pleiades star cluster at Harvard University's radio observatory. On one occasion, we saw an added feature in the data. It turned out to be an amateur radio enthusiast near the observatory, but at the time, I thought we had detected clear evidence of another civilisation.

A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence. . . . It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.

If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades', would we just reply, 'OK, call us when you get here - we'll leave the lights on'? Probably not - but this is more or less what is happening with AI.

Everything we know about the universe is studied by using telescopes or other instruments that look at visible light, infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray - different wavelengths of electromagnetic interactions. Only 4 percent of what's in the universe gives off electromagnetic radiation, so we don't have any handle on the rest.

It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.

No company is hiring anyone to search for messages from aliens. Most people don't seem to think there's much benefit to it. The lack of interest is, I think, because most people don't realize what even a simple detection would really mean.

The sun is the primary puzzle in the universe.

It would seem staggeringly arrogant to think we were the only ones in the universe, but at the same time, I don't know if contact has been made yet or not because you think something like that would be hard to cover up. I'm still on the fence. I keep an open mind about all of these things.

I believe there's other forms of intelligence in the universe. I've seen and heard some pretty convincing UFO stuff. Besides, if we're the most intelligent things in the universe... well, that's just depressing.

Galactic plankton is undoubtedly out there, but it's statistically highly likely there's also another intelligent civilisation out there somewhere. Unfortunately, the distances and time differences are so great, communication might remain impossible.

There was a magic about pulsars... no other things in the sky had such labels on them. Each one had its own distinct pulsing frequency, so it could be identified by anybody, including other creatures, after a long period of time and far, far away.