Scientists have always searched for extraterrestrial life, when a ship is sent to Mars or anywhere else, signs of possible past, present or future life are sought, the scientist who manages to find extraterrestrial life will automatically go down in history, his name will be remembered in textbooks, they will name streets, squares, universities, and will be at the same height as Einstein or Newton of course any scientist would like to one day be able to capture a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization or find evidence of the existence of life outside from the earth.
On September 2, Frank Drake, an astronomer and pioneer in several scientific projects, including projects to search for extraterrestrial life, died at the age of 92.
Frank Drake was one of these pioneers, the first project he worked on was the Ozman project of 1960, he also participated in the creation of the SETI institute and from 2003 until his death he was president emeritus of the same, but perhaps for what most famous this astronomer is for the equation he presented in 1961 and that bears his name.
An equation where I tried to calculate how many extraterrestrial technological civilizations may exist in our galaxy, unfortunately the equation raises many variables that we do not know, although there are other variables that are gradually being defined thanks to discoveries, among other things, of exoplanets.
Frank Drake is not the only scientist who raised the possibility of making at least one estimate of this type, Isaac Asimov in his book extraterrestrial civilizations of 1979 reached the surprising calculation of 530 thousand planets in which a technological civilization currently exists.
Another pioneer such as Carl Sagan raised in his work cosmos, "a personal journey" of 1980 was much less optimistic and reduced that figure by varying from a handful of civilizations to just one of ours, of course it depends on the variables, variables that we do not know , variables that Frank Drake managed to formulate in 1961 when he was working at the Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The estimate would be of a civilization similar to ours, in knowledge of radio communication, that is, those that in theory could communicate with us or pick up our signals, this is important because humans of all times always believe that we have been the forefront of technology and it is hard for us to imagine that other civilizations in the cosmos could be hundreds of thousands of years more evolved than us.
If a civilization with a million years more evolved were presented to us, we would see them as "magicians" or as "gods" in particular, our type of civilization is very specific, perhaps it only exists for a few centuries, I am not saying that we will go to become extinct, I say this because of weapons such as nuclear weapons that could erase us from the face of the earth or at least return us to the age of caves, what I mean is that our technology and our mentality can vary over time and take us to a different type of civilization.
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