Other scientists might have been depressed by the lack of progress he experienced in his search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But he was not cast down
was the number of detectable, intelligent civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy; to get that figure, you just multiplied the factors together. R* was the average rate of formation of stars in our galaxy: between one and ten a year, he thought.
This was not really an equation, but a thinking tool. People called it pure speculation, but each phenomenon had taken place in the universe at least once. It became so famous that it featured on. Of course, most of the terms had no known values. But the truly troublesome one was the last,, which was the average length of time a civilisation might be detectable. That was quite impossible to say. The figure he usually threw out was 10,000 years.
Despite the imponderables, he and his colleagues started searching. On the very first day of the experiment a regular pulse, eight times a second, was detected from Epsilon Eridani—but it turned out to be rogue radar from a passing aircraft. More than 100 other initially intriguing signals were seen, but all were probably artefacts.from the 1970s, but no proper programme until the 1990s, by which time Congress was losing patience. In 1993 it turned off the tap.
If faraway intelligences did not get in touch, they might perhaps be nudged to respond to messages. In 1974 he sent the first interstellar message from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico towards13, a globular star cluster 25,000 light-years away. In simple binary coding, it described where the message was from and what humans were like.
Other scientists might have been depressed by the lack of progress. It did not speed up even when new telescopes could produce reams of data in seconds, rather than months. But he was not cast down. His work had become part of an entirely new field of interdisciplinary research, astrobiology. Besides, his star-gazing on Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani was like buying two tickets for the lottery.
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