Astrophysicist Frank Drake wrote the Drake equation, an attempt to estimate N, the number of advanced civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy.
Many of the numbers that go into the Drake equation can only be guessed at, for example, the factor L, the average lifetime of an advanced civilisation.
According to Drake, the average of people's best estimates suggests that there are about 10,000 technically advanced civilisations spread across our galaxy.
Image: Frank Drake demonstrating his famous equation (credit: Dr Seth Shostak/SPL)
In the late 1960s, Frank Drake describes pulsars and the patterns found in their signals.
The Drake equation is designed to estimate the number of detectable alien civilisations in the Milky Way, as Frank Drake explains in this clip.
Frank Donald Drake PhD is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is most notable as one of the pioneers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the founding of SETI, mounting the first observational attempts at detecting extraterrestrial communications in 1960 in Project Ozma, developing the Drake equation, and as the creator of the Arecibo Message, a digital encoding of an astronomical and biological description of the Earth and its lifeforms for transmission into the cosmos.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the user-contributed encyclopedia. If you find the content in the 'About' section factually incorrect, defamatory or highly offensive you can edit this article at Wikipedia.
BBC © 2012 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.
