Professor Frank Drake says it is only a matter of time before mankind detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
\Detecting alien life is like winning the lottery, and to win any lottery we have to make many, many bets,"" said Drake, director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and emeritus professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Speaking to a crowd of 300 UW-Madison students and Madison residents last night in the Chemistry Building, Drake explained his institute's search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a project in which he has been involved since its inception in 1960.
Drake estimated there are about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, of which 10 percent are like our sun. That means there are at least 40 billion stars capable of sustaining life.
He referred to an equation he developed in 1961, known simply as ""Drake's Equation,"" which estimates the number of civilizations in the Milky Way based on seven factors, including rate of star formation and the length of time a civilization remains intact. Using this equation, Drake estimated there are at least 10,000 such civilizations.
Philip Morrison, Emeritus Institute Professor at MIT, wrote of Drake's Equation: ""Next to Einstein's equation, it is the most recognized equation in science.""
However, Drake said it is unlikely that we will even see Unidentifieed Flying Objects or aliens because their civilizations would be so far away that space travel, given our current understanding, would be infeasible.
""It would take the equivalent of 500,000 years of U.S. energy consumption to power a rocket to another civilization,"" he said, ""And the fastest rocket would only travel at 1/30,000th the speed of light.""
Instead, we can send an electromagnetic message to the end of the galaxy at the speed of light, for a dollar's worth of energy. He hypothesized that this is the most likely method of communication.
Kendra Rand, a first-year graduate student in physics, was skeptical of the project.
""There are so many unknowns that I'm not sure this is a worthwhile use of resources,"" she said. ""Still, it's interesting food for thought that we might not be alone.""
Drake was introduced by chemistry Professor Bassam Shakhashiri, who is also Drake's brother-in-law. Drake's talk was sponsored by the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy.
