Dr. Marvin Lee Minsky (born 1927)

Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 Turing Award.

Contents

Biography[edit]

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to an eye surgeon father, Henry, and to a mother, Fannie (Reiser), who was a Zionist activist.^[15][16][17] His family was Jewish. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He then served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem."^[18][19][20] He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957.^[21][22]

He was on the MIT faculty from 1958 to his death. He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958, and a year later he and John McCarthy initiated what is, as of 2019, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.^[23][24] He was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

Contributions in computer science[edit]

3D profile of a coin (partial) measured with a modern confocal white light microscope.

Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963)^[25] and the confocal microscope^{[2][note 1]} (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). He developed, with Seymour Papert, the first Logo "turtle". Minsky also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC. In 1962, Minsky worked in small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine.^[26]

Minsky's book Perceptrons (written with Seymour Papert) attacked the work of Frank Rosenblatt, and became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks. The book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim it to have had great importance in discouraging research of neural networks in the 1970s, and contributing to the so-called "AI winter".^[27] He also founded several other AI models. His paper A framework for representing knowledge^[28] created a new paradigm in knowledge representation. While his Perceptrons is now more a historical than practical book, the theory of frames is in wide use.^[29] Minsky also wrote of the possibility that extraterrestrial life may think like humans, permitting communication.^[30]

In the early 1970s, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Papert started developing what came to be known as the Society of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, Minsky published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for the general public.

The MA-3 Robotic Manipulator Arm, on display at MIT Museum

General view
the Belgrade Hand

In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his webpage.^[31]

Role in popular culture[edit]

Minsky was an adviser^[32] on Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor.^[33] Minsky is mentioned explicitly in Arthur C. Clarke's derivative novel of the same name, where he is portrayed as achieving a crucial break-through in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century:

In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how artificial neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.^[34]

In Fargo Season 3 episode 3 (titled "The Law of Non-Contradiction"), at least two allusions are made to Minsky. The first, through the depiction of a "useless machine": a device that was invented by Minsky as a philosophical joke. The second, through the depiction of an animation of a robot called "minsky" - a character in a sci-fi novel called "The Planet Wyh".

Personal life[edit]

The Minskytron or "Three Position Display" running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1, 2007

In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children.^[35] Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist^[36] who published musings on the relations between music and psychology.

Opinions[edit]

Minsky was an atheist.^[37] He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics.^[38]

He was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots,^[39] and argued that a fundamental difference between humans and machines was that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents that comprise the brain.^[40] He argued that "somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people," but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be.^[41] He cautioned that an artificial superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to assume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal,^[42] but believed that such negative scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would go through a lot of testing before being deployed.^[43]

Association with Jeffrey Epstein[edit]

Minsky received a $100,000 research grant from Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, four years before Epstein's first arrest for sex offenses; it was the first from Epstein to MIT. Minsky received no further research grants from him.^[44][45]

Minsky organized two academic symposia on Epstein's private island Little Saint James, one in 2002 and another in 2011, after Epstein was a registered sex offender.^[46] Virginia Giuffre testified in a 2015 deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell that Maxwell "directed" her to have sex with Minsky among others. There has been no allegation that sex between them took place nor a lawsuit against Minsky's estate.^[47] Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, says that he could not have had sex with any of the women at Epstein's residences, as they were always together during all of the visits to Epstein's residences.^[48][49]

Death[edit]

In January 2016 Minsky died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 88.^[50] Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board.^[51] Alcor will neither confirm nor deny whether Minsky was cryonically preserved.^[52]

Bibliography (selected)[edit]

1967 – Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall
1986 – The Society of Mind
2006 – The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Awards and affiliations[edit]

Minsky won the Turing Award (the greatest distinction in computer science)^[40] in 1969, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982,^[53] the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute for 2001.^[54] In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for co-founding the field of artificial intelligence, creating early neural networks and robots, and developing theories of human and machine cognition."^[55] In 2011, Minsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".^[56][57] In 2014, Minsky won the Dan David Prize for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind".^[58] He was also awarded with the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category.^[59]

Minsky was affiliated with the following organizations:

United States National Academy of Engineering^[25]
United States National Academy of Sciences^[25]
Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors^[60]
Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board^[51]
kynamatrix Research Network's Board of Directors^[61]

Media appearances[edit]

Future Fantastic (1996)
Machine Dreams (1988)

Notes[edit]

^ The patent for Minsky's Microscopy Apparatus was applied for in 1957, and subsequently granted US Patent Number 3,013,467 in 1961. According to his published biography on the MIT Media Lab webpage, "In 1956, when a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Minsky invented and built the first Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality".

References[edit]

^ Minsky, Marvin (1961). "Steps toward Artificial Intelligence" (PDF). Proceedings of the IRE. 49: 8–30. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.79.7413. doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1961.287775. S2CID 14250548.
^
Jump up to:
^a ^b Minsky, Marvin (1988). "Memoir on inventing the confocal scanning microscope". Scanning. 10 (4): 128–138. doi:10.1002/sca.4950100403.
^ Pesta, A (March 12, 2014). "Looking for Something Useful to Do With Your Time? Don't Try This". WSJ. Retrieved March 24, 2014.
^ Hillis, Danny; McCarthy, John; Mitchell, Tom M.; Mueller, Erik T.; Riecken, Doug; Sloman, Aaron; Winston, Patrick Henry (2007). "In Honor of Marvin Minsky's Contributions on his 80th Birthday". AI Magazine. 28 (4): 109. doi:10.1609/aimag.v28i4.2064.
^ Papert, Seymour; Minsky, Marvin Lee (1988). Perceptrons: an introduction to computational geometry. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63111-2.
^ Minsky, Marvin Lee (1986). The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-60740-1. The first comprehensive description of the Society of Mind theory of intellectual structure and development. See also The Society of Mind (CD-ROM version), Voyager, 1996.
^ Minsky, Marvin Lee (2007). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-7664-1.
^ "Elected AAAI Fellows". www.aaai.org.
^ Marvin Lee Minsky at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
^ Marvin Lee Minsky at the AI Genealogy Project.
^ "Personal page for Marvin Minsky". web.media.mit.edu. Retrieved June 23, 2016.
^ Marvin Minsky at DBLP Bibliography Server
^ Marvin Minsky publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
^ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.com.
^
Jump up to:
^a ^b Winston, Patrick Henry (2016). "Marvin L. Minsky (1927-2016)". Nature. 530 (7590): 282. Bibcode:2016Natur.530..282W. doi:10.1038/530282a. PMID 26887486.
^ Swedin, Eric Gottfrid (August 10, 2005). Science in the Contemporary World: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 188 – via Internet Archive. marvin minsky jewish.
^ Campbell-Kelly, Martin (February 3, 2016). "Marvin Minsky obituary" – via www.theguardian.com.
^ Minsky, Marvin (July 31, 1954). "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem" – via catalog.princeton.edu.
^ Minsky, Marvin Lee (1954). Theory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain Model Problem (PhD thesis). Princeton University. OCLC 3020680. ProQuest 301998727.
^ Hillis, Danny; McCarthy, John; Mitchell, Tom M.; Mueller, Erik T.; Riecken, Doug; Sloman, Aaron; Winston, Patrick Henry (2007). "In Honor of Marvin Minsky's Contributions on his 80th Birthday". AI Magazine. 28 (4): 103–110. Retrieved November 24, 2010.
^ Society of Fellows, Listed by Term
^ "Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. Biography and Interview". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
^ Horgan, John (November 1993). "Profile: Marvin L. Minsky: The Mastermind of Artificial Intelligence". Scientific American. 269 (5): 14–15. Bibcode:1993SciAm.269e..35H. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1193-35.
^ Rifkin, Glenn (January 28, 2016). "Marvin Minsky, pioneer in artificial intelligence, dies at 88". The Tech. MIT. Retrieved July 20, 2017.
^
Jump up to:
^a ^b ^c "Brief Academic Biography of Marvin Minsky". Web.media.mit.edu. Retrieved January 26, 2016.
^ Turlough Neary, Damien Woods, "Small Weakly Universal Turing Machines", Machines, Computations, and Universality 2007, proceedings, Orleans, France, September 10–13, 2007, ISBN 3540745920, p. 262-263
^ Olazaran, Mikel (August 1996). "A Sociological Study of the Official History of the Perceptrons Controversy". Social Studies of Science. 26 (3): 611–659. doi:10.1177/030631296026003005. JSTOR 285702. S2CID 16786738.
^ Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P. H. Winston (Ed.), The psychology of computer vision. New York: McGraw-Hill Book.
^ "Minsky's frame system theory". Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing – TINLAP '75. 1975. pp. 104–116. doi:10.3115/980190.980222. S2CID 1870840.
^ Minsky, Marvin (April 1985). "Communication with Alien Intelligence". Byte. Vol. 10, no. 4. Peterborough, New Hampshire: UBM Technology Group. p. 127. Retrieved July 30, 2019.
^ "Marvin Minsky's Home Page". web.media.mit.edu.
^ For more, see this interview, "Archived copy". Archived from the original on June 16, 2012. Retrieved May 11, 2014.
^ "AI pioneer Marvin Minsky dies aged 88". BBC News. January 26, 2016. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
^ Clarke, Arthur C. (April 1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hutchinson, UK
New American Library, US. ISBN 0-453-00269-2.
^ "R.I.P. Marvin Minsky". Washington Post. January 26, 2016. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
^ "Obituary: Marvin Minsky, 88; MIT professor helped found field of artificial intelligence". Boston Globe. January 26, 2016. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
^ Lederman, Leon M.; Scheppler, Judith A. (2001). "Marvin Minsky: Mind Maker". Portraits of Great American Scientists. Prometheus Books. p. 74. ISBN 9781573929325. Another area where he "goes against the flow" is in his spiritual beliefs. As far as religion is concerned, he's a confirmed atheist. "I think it [religion] is a contagious mental disease. ... The brain has a need to believe it knows a reason for things.
^ "SCIENTISTS' OPEN LETTER ON CRYONICS". The Science of Cryonics. Biostasis.com. March 19, 2004. Retrieved May 6, 2020.
^ Salon.com Technology |Artificial stupidity Archived June 30, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
^
Jump up to:
^a ^b "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88". The New York Times. January 25, 2016. Retrieved January 25, 2016.
^ "For artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, computers have soul". Jerusalem Post. May 13, 2014. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
^ Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter (2003). "Section 26.3: The Ethics and Risks of Developing Artificial Intelligence". Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0137903955. Similarly, Marvin Minsky once suggested that an AI program designed to solve the Riemann Hypothesis might end up taking over all the resources of Earth to build more powerful supercomputers to help achieve its goal.
^ Achenbach, Joel (January 6, 2016). "Marvin Minsky, an architect of artificial intelligence, dies at 88". Washington Post. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
^ Subbaraman, Nidhi (January 10, 2020). "MIT review of Epstein donations finds "significant mistakes of judgment"". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-00072-x. PMID 33420402. S2CID 214375389.
^ Braceras, Roberto M.; Chunias, Jennifer L.; Martin, Kevin P. (January 10, 2020). "Report Concerning Jeffrey Epstein's Interactions with the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology" (PDF). mit.edu. pp. 9, 15.
^ "AI pioneer accused of having sex with trafficking victim on Jeffrey Epstein's island". The Verge. August 9, 2019. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
^ Briquelet, Kate; et al. (September 16, 2019). "Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Names Powerful Men in Alleged Sex Ring". The Daily Beast. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
^ Carlistle, Madeline; Mansoor, Sanya (August 14, 2019). "The Jeffrey Epstein Investigation Continues After His Death. Here's Who Else Could Be Investigated". Time. Retrieved July 28, 2019. Minsky’s widow, Gloria Rudisch, denied he had sex with Giuffre or any other girls
^ Saul, Emily; Denney, Andrew; Eustachewich, Lia (August 9, 2019). "Jeffrey Epstein's alleged 'sex slave' reveals the men she claims she was forced to sleep with". New York Post. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
^ Pearson, Michael (January 26, 2016). "Pioneering computer scientist Marvin Minsky dies at 88". CNN. Retrieved April 7, 2016.
^
Jump up to:
^a ^b "Alcor Scientific Advisory Board". Alcor. January 14, 2016. Archived from the original on January 14, 2016. Retrieved April 7, 2016.
^ "Official Alcor Statement Concerning Marvin Minsky". Alcor News. Alcor Life Extension Foundation. January 27, 2016. Retrieved May 6, 2020.
^ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
^ Marvin Minsky – The Franklin Institute Awards – Laureate Database Archived May 26, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. Franklin Institute. Retrieved on March 25, 2008.
^ "Marvin Minsky: 2006 Fellow". Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on March 29, 2015. Retrieved July 30, 2019.
^ "AI's Hall of Fame" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. 26 (4): 5–15. 2011. doi:10.1109/MIS.2011.64. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 16, 2011. Retrieved September 4, 2015.
^ "IEEE Computer Society Magazine Honors Artificial Intelligence Leaders". DigitalJournal.com. August 24, 2011. Retrieved September 18, 2011. Press release source: PRWeb (Vocus).
^ "Dan David prize 2014 winners". May 15, 2014. Retrieved May 20, 2014.
^ "MIT artificial intelligence, robotics pioneer feted: Award celebrates Minsky's career". BostonGlobe.com. August 24, 2011. Retrieved January 18, 2014.
^ "Extropy Institute Directors & Advisors". www.extropy.org.
^ "kynamatrix Research Network : About". www.kynamatrix.org. Retrieved February 9, 2018.

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marvin Minsky.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Marvin Minsky.

Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Minsky describes artificial intelligence (AI) research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Topics include: the work of John McCarthy; changes in the MIT research laboratories with the advent of Project MAC; research in the areas of expert systems, graphics, word processing, and time-sharing; variations in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) attitude toward AI.
Oral history interview with Terry Winograd at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Winograd describes his work in computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discussing the work of Marvin Minsky and others.
Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show November 26, 2003
Consciousness Is A Big Suitcase: A talk with Marvin Minsky
Video of Minsky speaking at the International Conference on Complex Systems, hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI)
"The Emotion Universe": Video with Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky's thoughts on the Fermi Paradox at the Transvisions 2007 conference
"Health, population and the human mind": Marvin Minsky talk at the TED conference
"The Society of Mind" on MIT OpenCourseWare
Marvin Minsky tells his life story at Web of Stories (video)
Appearances on C-SPAN

2017 (August 04) - HorizonWeekly.ca : "The soviet-era conference in Armenia on communicating with aliens"

Aug 04, 2017 By Charlotte Poulain / Saved PDF : [HX002M][GDrive]

Mentioned : Dr. Marvin Lee Minsky (born 1927) / Dr. Carl Edward Sagan (born 1934) /

[HX002N][GDrive]

In 1971, the first international Conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence was jointly organized by the US National Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Sciences. The Conferencetook place Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Armenia.

Forty-six years ago, in the midst of the Cold War, 44 scientists from the USSR and the United States gathered at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Armenia. Each scientist had impeccable credentials, most of them were well-known in their field, and three were Nobel-Prize winners. The theme of the conference? Communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence.

The Byurakan Observatory is nestled on the slope of Mount Aragats, a mere forty-minute drive from Yerevan, Armenia. Founded in 1946, the observatory is most famous for its work on stellar associations, and several international conferences that were held there during the soviet era.

At first, it was the observatory’s soviet-style architecture and its emblematic astronomy tower that sparked our interest. Then we found out about a peculiar event: Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI), The First International Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations and Problems of Contact with Them was held at the Byurakan Observatory in September 1971.

For us, this was very exciting news: of all places, the first major international conference dedicated to communicating with aliens had taken place right here, in sunny Byurakan.

Inspired by the conference, we started to dig deeper into its history as we developed our exhibition concept. Hasmik spent a few lonely days at the National Science library, perusing lengthy volumes that offered first-hand accounts of that conference, meeting minutes and anecdotes. Here’s a sneak peek of what we discovered.

Searching for life in space and launching toy rockets

Extraterrestrial civilizations, their level of development (and potential aggressiveness) makes a great topic for high budget Hollywood movies. But it’s also an actual question for scientists around the world.

The collective umbrella term for research that focuses on extraterrestrial life is search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The branch of that research focused on trying to communicate with our potential neighbours is called communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI), dates back to the 19th century, and really took off in the early 20th century once enough scientists from planet Earth started mastering the art of radio communications.

Skeptical scientists have occasionally criticized SETI as a form of pseudoscience, but that didn’t prevent it from being the topic of hundreds of scientific symposiums around the world, nor from benefiting from public funding.

Hence in 1971, the first international Conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence was jointly organized by the US National Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Sciences.

On this occasion, the Byurakan observatory hosted scientists who worked in various fields related to CETI: astronomers, physicists, radiophysicists, geneticists, biologists, chemists, archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists.

Among the most well-known attendees were scientist Victor Ambartsumian (USSR), one of the founders of theoretical astrophysics, astrophysicist and science-fiction author [Dr. Carl Edward Sagan (born 1934)] (US), known for his work as a science popularizer and as the initiator of the Pioneer Plaques and the Voyager Golden Records, astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake (US), who developed the Drake equation the Byurakan conference was based on (more on that below), and cognitive scientist and AI expert [Dr. Marvin Lee Minsky (born 1927)] (US).

In our research, we came across this picture of some of the greatest minds from the USSR and the United States gathering around [Dr. Marvin Lee Minsky (born 1927)] as he launched a water-propelled toy rocket in the garden of the Byurakan Observatory.

In “Remembering Minsky”, George Dyson recalls asking his friend about the toy rocket in 1994, and Marvin Minsky commented “Yes. I brought a miniature water rocket to the meeting, assuming that it would amaze everyone, because it embodied such high technology in a plastic children’s toy. The second stage was automatically launched from the top of the first stage when the first stage pressure fell low enough to release the docking device.”

This experiment was recorded in the meeting proceedings as an aborted mission due to a second stage failure. According to [Dr. Marvin Lee Minsky (born 1927)], however, the rocket worked very well, and the upper stage ended up on the roof of the Observatory: ‘it may still be there, for all I know.”

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The Drake Equation, or the probability we’ll ever meet up with aliens

Toy rockets aside, the agenda for the conference followed each variable of the Drake Equation, a formula used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.

I know this looks overwhelming, but it’s really worth stopping here for a second and having a closer look at the factors in this equation.

R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

The assumption here is that if we plug all these terms together, we can estimate the number of alien civilizations we could detect, and interact with. Straightforward enough. The only issue? At the time it was created, the only known value in this equation was the first one, the average rate of star formation. Many in the scientific community have pointed out that all the other variables are based largely (or entirely) on conjecture. It’s not only that we don’t know the values yet – it’s that calculating them is more about wild guesses than scientific research.

“The last terms in the equation, those framing the grandest question of whether humans are alone in their conscious curiosity, will be impossible to define until we detect extraterrestrial intelligence itself”, writes Frank Drake’s daughter Nadia. “Until we hear those alien murmurs, all we can do is estimate the value of N by plugging in the numbers we know and making educated guesses about the numbers we don’t.”

The point of the equation, however, was never to come up with an estimated figure, but rather to stimulate dialogue on these topics.

Frank Drake formulated the equation as an agenda for discussion at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank in West Virginia, in 1961. In other words: this equation was never meant to be solved, but rather intended to frame the problem, and organize scientific discussion. As MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager put it, “In science, you always need an equation—but this isn’t one you’re going to solve.”

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[HX002Q][GDrive]

Hi! This is Earth. Are you up? Netflix and chill?

Following the recommendations made at the CETI conference in Byurakan, the Board of the Scientific Council on the Radio Astronomy Problem Area, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, approved in 1974 a Research Program on the Problem of Communication with Extraterrestrial Civilizations.

Several of the scientists in attendance at the Byurakan conference went on to actively try to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Frank Drake started an effort to send signals into space and make our planet discoverable for alien SETI programs (because in all likeliness, they’re looking for us too). In 1974, he created a message that was broadcasted from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The message essentially introduced humanity and gave our planet’s address to anyone who would listen. We haven’t heard back yet.

[Dr. Carl Edward Sagan (born 1934)] and Frank Drake worked together to design the Pioneer plaques, the first physical messages that were ever sent into space in 1972 and 1973, with two Pioneer spacecrafts (Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11). Establishing what we want to communicate with potential extraterrestrial life, and how to communicate it, is a daunting challenge. To achieve it, Carl Sagan appealed to his then-wife, artist Linda Salzman Sagan, to craft the message. On the final plaques, the relative position of the sun to the galaxy, the solar system, the silhouette of the spacecraft, as well as two nude figures of a man and a woman, were engraved.

[Dr. Carl Edward Sagan (born 1934)] continued working on refining planet Earth’s messages to aliens, eventually putting together the Voyager Golden Records, phonograph records which contain sounds and images of Earth’s inhabitants. These records were attached to the two Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977, that are still traveling through space (Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012). They haven’t been intercepted by an extra-terrestrial border management force yet. But if they ever are, aliens will be hearing enthusiastic greetings in 55 languages, including Armenian!

Every story we uncover about the 1971 CETI conference only makes us more enthusiastic about working with artists and scientists in Byurakan this fall. The project is called CETI Lab, and consists of an artists’ residency and exhibit, in which artists and astrophysicists come together to collectively imagine communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence. More information will come soon!

Sources

“How my Dad’s Equation Sparked the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, Nadia Drake, National Geographic, 30 June 2014, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140630-drake-equation-50-years-later-aliens-science/
“Remembering Minsky”, George Dyson, https://www.edge.org/conversation/marvin_minsky-remembering-minsky
“Scientific Council on the Radio-Astronomy Problem Area”, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Astron., Zh., 51, 1125-1132 (September-October 1974), https://history.nasa.gov/SP-419/s3.11.htm
“The Pioneer Plaque: Science as a Universal Language”, Jake Rosenthal, Planetary Society, January 20, 2016, http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2016/0120-the-pioneer-plaque-science-as-a-universal-language.html
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