Fermi Vs Drake. If you call them, they will come ...

You know that there are some dozens of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, that have the ability to communicate with ours, but that apparently are too pretentious, to answer our desperate and miserable attempts to establish friendly communication with someone, so that we feel which nerd at her sister's makeup club party.

Back in the 60s, of the last century, there is a movement that begins under the guidance of Carl Sagan, that of the appointment up and Frank Drake, who is one of the protagonists of this post and under SETI's acronym, Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, brings together a set of projects whose purpose is to discover if there is intelligent extraterrestrial life, mainly through the detection of its emissions in the electromagnetic spectrum , that is, they are trying to tune into alien television or radio programs.

Out of jokes, the SETI, brings together a group of scientists from areas such as astronomy, astrophysics, astrobiology and other astro something, hoping to find evidence that we are not alone in the universe and that intelligent life is not a phenomenon that only occurred on our planet. And, we need to talk to someone else, because talking to plants is not as fun as it seems.

Within this context, in 1961, Frank Drake, proposes a probabilistic equation, which allows us to estimate how many extraterrestrial civilizations, with the ability to generate electromagnetic emissions, may exist in our galaxy. Drake, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial life, was the creator and promoter of the Ozma project, a forerunner of SETI and is currently the director emeritus of the SETI Institute.

Drake trying to decide, what factor is missing from his equation to find the Anunaki. Source

The Drake equation consists of the product of several estimated factors, which allows to determine probabilistically, how many civilizations, with a degree of technological advance similar or superior to ours, could exist in our galaxy. The equation is the following:

Where N is the number of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, R* is the number of stars in our galaxy, fp the portion of stars with planetary systems, ne the number of habitable planets in each planetary system, ft is the fraction of these planets , where life developed, fi the fraction in which life developed intelligence, fc the fraction where this intelligent life, has developed radial communications and L the fraction of time of the planets during which intelligent civilization lives.

According to the original estimates, made by Drake, there should be at least ten advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. In its time, this estimate was considered too optimistic, nowadays, after the advances in the discovery of exoplanets (planets in other star systems), this estimate has improved, to at least twenty, however there are more pessimistic calculations than they indicate that at most there will be one more civilization that can establish contact with us; as well as even more optimistic calculations, with hundreds or thousands. But there is really no way to estimate several of the factors that make up the equation, for example, the number of planets that have developed life or the number of intelligent civilizations that exist, because in both cases we only know that there is life and also intelligent, on our planet, although some politicians and "pop stars", among other acolytes of stupidity, seem to attest to the contrary.

With the hope of calling the house of ET, the SETI and other organizations, they have organized several projects, which involve sending radio messages, from several radio telescopes around the world, at different times and directions. The best known is the one sent on November 16, 1974, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, in the direction of the globular cluster M13 located about 25,000 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules, this message contains 1679 bits of information, in form of a diagram where we represent our physical structure, the double helix of DNA, the numbers from 1 to 10 and a few other things, not much can be said in 1679 bits, it is less than a tweet !.

WhatsApp message, sent to ET from Arecibo in 1974. Source

Messages have also been placed on space missions such as the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes and the Voyager I and II, the latter, today, are the objects created by man that are farthest from the earth, even reaching the Voyager I, to be found in what can be defined as interstellar space, having left the heliosphere, or area of ​​influence of the solar wind, both carry a disk made of gold, which includes, among other things, the audio of greetings in 55 languages, music, sounds of the earth, descriptions of units of measurements, diagrams of our DNA, human anatomy and variety of images of different nature.

Another one of the emblematic programs of the SETI, perhaps because it makes part of the search for alien signals to anyone who wants to collaborate, is the SETI @ home, an initiative that allows anyone who has a computer with an Internet connection to contribute to the processing of packets, which contain fragments of data, product of the exploration of different regions of space by radio telescopes, this by installing a software similar to a screensaver that, while the computer is not in use, downloads these packages and performs the analysis of the data they contain, and then send the results of the process, to the corresponding project server.

But, if there are other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, which we are looking for, for about 60 years, which probably being intelligent and have developed scientifically, should have a great curiosity, similar to that which characterizes us, so that, consequently, they should also be interested in knowing if there is anyone else in the universe, which leads to the deduction that they should also be looking for signs of intelligence, then, why have not we found these civilizations or them to us? Or maybe they found us first and simply decided that it's not worth talking to us ... damn presumptuous.

To date, the closest thing to an extraterrestrial intelligence signal, which has been detected, is the ingeniously named ** _ "Wow Sign!" _ **, which was picked up by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University , on August 15, 1977, consisted of a signal of 72 seconds, with an intensity 30 times greater than the microwave background radiation, coming from the constellation of Sagittarius, against which Jerry R. Ehman, professor of the University Ohio, who was checked the records printed by the computer, expressed his perplexity, issuing and leaving his mark on the margin of the paper with a formidable ** _ "Wow!" _ **, to see that nothing was planned. The origin of the signal has been monitored later by several observatories, not detecting emissions from the same region of the sky.

Printout of the Wow! Sign, note the Wow !.Source

To be continue…!

Up to here the post, for today, as I wrote I was lengthening the matter, so, not to make the reading too heavy, I preferred to divide it into two or three deliveries, I'll see how much the rest is lengthened . I hope it was to your liking, if so, share it with your followers and do not fear to vote. Thank you very much for your attention.

References:

“La ecuación de Drake”. El País, 7 de Julio de 2017.
“¿Cómo conseguir novio/a usando la ciencia? - La ecuación de Drake”. Date un Vlog. YouTube, 22 de abril de 2017.
“Carl Sagan Ecuacion Drake”, fragmento de la miniserie para la televisión, COSMOS, de Carl Sagan. Publicado por WCepheii. YouTube, 17 de septiembre de 2011.
“Frank Drake“. Wikipedia
"Mensaje de Arecibo". Wikipedia
"Voyager". Wikipedia
"Señal Wow!". Wikipedia