14 Quotes by Frank Drake

Is there intelligent life on Earth?

Only by doing the best we can with the very best that an era offers, do we find the way to do better in the future.

The story seems to be that almost every star has a planetary system... and, also, the definition of 'habitable zone' has expanded. In our system, it used to be that only Mars and Earth were potentially habitable. Now we've got an ocean on Europa... Titan.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

It now appears that essentially every star has a planetary system. In the very beginning, we thought at best half.

Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room. Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.

People presume we've been somehow monitoring the entire sky at all frequencies, all the time, but we haven't yet been able to do any of those things. The fact is, all the SETI efforts to date have only closely examined a couple thousand nearby stars, and we're only just now learning which of those might have promising planets.

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.

While NASA talks about 'Are we alone?' as a number one question, they are putting zero money into searching for intelligent life. There's a big disconnect there.