When We Find Them

For centuries, humans have looked to the heavens and asked: Are we alone in the universe? And when it comes to answering that question, it’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. With that day on the horizon, are we, as humans, ready for what insight that might bring? “When We Find Them” is a new limited podcast series from Central Florida Public Media that looks at our search for life in the universe and the not so finished plan to tell the world what we find. We’ll look at our current efforts to search for life, the protocols in place to confirm such an extraordinary finding, and look at how we – as humans – may react when our entire worldview changes. Subscribe to “When We Find Them,” from Central Florida Public Media.

Latest Episodes:

False alarms Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

In the search for life in the universe there have been plenty of close calls. Each instance brings us closer to answering that existential question and lays bare how we as humans may react to such a revelation. In this episode, we’ll take a look at those close calls.We begin in Cambridge, England, in 1967, where a graduate student by the name of Jocelyn Bell Burnell is working on a brand new radio telescope. She’s on the hunt for quasars – these mysterious and powerful bursts of energy in the cosmos.“They were the really hot, sexy topic at that time and very new,” she told me during an interview in March 2020.Jocelyn Bell Burnell photographed after a March 202 interview with Central Florida Public Media at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.(Brendan Byrne / Central Florida Public Media)We talked about that hunt for quasars and how it led her to something completely unexpected.“It was a string of pulses, about one and one-third seconds apart, so it was going - dit - dit - dit - dit - dit - which suspiciously like some man – a human being – doing something,” she said.Was someone out there signaling Earth? Did Bell Burnell finally find what Frank Drake was listening for? In less than a decade was the question of are we alone already answered?What Bell Burnell found was groundbreaking, and just one of many times we thought we had that answer to whether or not we were alone in the universe.Little Green MenEmma Chapman is an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in England. She uses radio telescopes in her work to look at the cosmic dawn, the first signs of our universe’s formation. But she also combs through historical astronomical data looking for signals that might be from some other civilization — sent to us on purpose or on accident.And it was that kind of data that Bell Burnell stumbled upon some 60 years ago.“She was looking for all this data in her printouts that were coming from this radio telescope,” Chapman explained of Bell Burnell’s work.Bell Burnell was looking through a scroll of chart paper that measured cosmic radio intensity much like a cardiac ECG does. In a football field’s length of this chart paper she found what she described as “a little bit of scruff” of a repeating signal. The little “bit of scruff” Bell Bernell discovered which would later be identified as pulsars.(National Radio Astronomy Observatory. )“They ended up saying, ‘is this repeating signal coming from this one place in the sky? Could it be little green men, you know?’ And they wrote LGM,” said Chapman.“‘Maybe it's aliens’ is a bit of a catchphrase in astronomy,” she said. “That's where it began.”But it wasn’t aliens. That dit - dit - dit - dit - that Bell Burnell saw in that data showed up again and again.“Very quickly they actually realized that they had spotted two or three more in different areas of the sky,” said Chapman. “Now the chances of aliens contacting you all at the same time from three or four different completely remote places in the universe is vanishingly small.”It was a false alarm. But the finding wasn’t a bust. Instead, she found evidence of what are now called pulsars — cosmic lighthouses of energy – a neutron star that spins rapidly emitting beams of radiation.The discovery wasn’t evidence of intelligent life. But it was profound enough to earn a Nobel Prize in 1974. Controversially, though, not for Bell Burnell.The finding is just the first of many false alarms that clue us in to just how the world might react to the day we find the real thing, and those findings happened much closer to home than we ever expected.Life in a Mars rock?On August 7, 1996, President Bill Clinton addressed reporters on the South Lawn of the White House.“Today, rock 840001 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks to the possibility of life,” he said. “If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.” President Clinton speaks to reporters on August 7, 1996 about the Allan Hills meteorite findings.(YouTube / William J. Clinton Presidential Library)Scientists found what they thought was microbial evidence of life in a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica in 1984. It was a chunk of Mars that broke off and found its way to Earth, and trapped within it, some scientists thought, evidence of life from another planet.Amy Williams is an astrobiologist at the University of Florida and a scientist on NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers — which are currently searching for evidence of life on Mars now.“This meteorite was being studied by a group at Johnson Space Center, and as they continue to study it, they found what they argued were multiple lines of geochemical evidence that came together,” she said. “ They said the most parsimonious explanation would be that this could be life – a form of preserved life in this meteorite.”The Allan Hills 84001 meteorite(NASA/JSC/Stanford University)The team was led by NASA scientist David S. McKay. But as other scientists took a closer look at the findings, they disagreed with the initial conclusion.“I would say the community generally [finds the] consensus is no, you don't have evidence for ancient Martian life in this meteorite,” she said. “But this discovery and the conversation that it started is truly the birthplace of modern astrobiology."Astrobiology is the scientific study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. Simply put, it studies whether there is life in the universe.While the findings from that meteorite didn’t answer that question, it got scientists closer to an answer. President Clinton charged NASA with exploring Mars further.Later that year, the Mars Global Surveyor mission launched, and in 1997, NASA’s Mars Pathfinder landed on the red planet. While those missions were already underway, the publicity from the now-debunked findings no doubt propelled the search for life into a new era.“People still walk around remembering this meteorite paper. I see it serving both [the] good and negative sides of science education and communicating with the public,” she said. “It’s really great that it launched astrobiology. It lays bare the challenges and flaws inherent in the scientific method. We're not always right. That's why we test hypotheses."And those hypotheses would be tested again and again on planets other than Mars.A mysterious gas on VenusIn September 2020, a team of astronomers announced the finding of phosphene gas in the upper atmosphere of Venus.Phosphene is a colorless gas. Here on Earth, it’s created by decaying organisms – what was once life.Venus is known as Earth’s twin. It’s similar to our planet in size, mass, and structure — it’s rocky, like ours. But what is on the surface is far from Earth. It’s a toxic inferno with a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. It’s hot enough to melt lead.So why is phosphene detected on Venus?An artistic impression of phosphen in the clouds of Venus.Researchers hypothesized that the presence of phosphene gas must be some sort of “aerial” life form in the planet’s clouds.( European Space Organization)Phosphine is pretty common in things like giant planets, and there's a bunch of mechanisms we think that might produce it, but it is exceedingly rare in smaller rocky worlds like Venus, and on Earth,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.”Phosphine, as we know it, is linked to life, found in places like bogs and swamps from the organic breakdown by bacteria. A finding of phosphene in Venus points to the possibility of life within its atmosphere.“This phosphine detection really was stunning, and the team went through great lengths to first off demonstrate the robustness of their detection, and then to offer explanations that might account for why there might be phosphine there,” Byrne said. “And what they felt was that there really wasn't much they could rule in, except perhaps some kind of weird biology.”Was that weird biology alien life? The findings captured the attention of the media and other scientists who worked to confirm what they found. Follow-up studies challenged whether the team detected the phosphene signal at all, and the original researchers revised their estimate of just how much phosphene there was.Now, whether the findings are an indication of life are still up in the air.“Like anything, when we detect the potential trace of a gas we might not expect in the atmosphere of a planet, whether this system or beyond, there is going to be a lot of scrutiny, and that's how it should be,” said Byrne. “That is the scientific method."But sometimes public interest outweighs scientific merit.“Why the hell didn’t you come by?”“Are aliens headed for Earth, right now?” asked one news anchor in October 2025. He was referring to a news story about 3I/Atlas, a comet that originated beyond our solar system that would pass by Earth – although it posed no threat.It was discovered in July that year and is the third known interstellar object to travel through our solar system.“It's a comet that came in at such high speed that it can only have been on an orbit kind of way out of our solar system's reaches,” said Chapman.Some in the science community thought it might be alien technology – a beacon or interstellar spacecraft.But the science community overwhelmingly argued it wasn’t from an alien civilization. Despite that, the comet continued to capture headlines and social media posts. It brought the search for life into the mainstream — even just briefly — and put attention to the skies and that question: are we alone? Is someone coming to say hello?The scientific community turned its eyes to the comet as it made its closest flyby in December 2025, taking careful observations to see if it might be some sort of alien technology, a beacon, or interstellar spacecraft.It wasn’t. And neither were the two that came before it.“From what we believe and observe and have understood about these — no, they were not in fact engineered, that they were natural objects,” said Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute.“Yes, it was disappointing,” he said. “It would have been amazing if it was a spacecraft, except I would then say, if you're a spacecraft, why the hell didn't you come by? If you came all that way, it'd be kind of a shame to miss us.”The interstellar visitor – and the media attention it garnered – shows a gap between what some call scientific nonsense and public interest, said York University anthropologist Katheryn Denning.“It's so important in those cases to acknowledge that the scientific community at large is pretty darn clear on what those objects are or were, and what they are not,” she said. “But it's a really interesting example in how the larger scientific consensus does not necessarily carry the day in terms of public opinion."But there’s still one longstanding false alarm that still doesn’t have consensus as to what it actually is.The “Wow!” signalThe Big Ear telescope at Ohio State University was massive. It was three football fields wide and from 1973 to 1995, its job was to listen for extraterrestrial radio signals.“In 1977 they got an incredibly strong burst of radio light,” said Chapman. “Now, this is one of the brightest radio signals we've ever received, and the astronomer who was combing through the data at the time saw this really high intensity burst, and wrote "wow" with an exclamation mark in the margins of that data.”The “Wow!” signal is one example of a time we thought we found life, although some scientists aren’t convinced it was a false alarm.(Ohio State University Radio Observatory (OSURO) and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO))The “Wow!” signal. It’s a computer printout with a bunch of printed numbers. But a series of numbers and letters is circled in red ink with that word Wow written in the margin. Radio telescopes collect radio waves that are traveling through space. Using massive dishes, they listen for these waves, then turn them into numbers or letters that represent the intensity and frequency of the waves.Radio telescopes collect radio waves that are traveling through space. Using massive dishes, they listen for these waves, then turn them into numbers or letters that represent the intensity and frequency of the waves. Chapman explains these printouts look a lot like a scene from the movie The Matrix.“Like the kind of like the green numbers falling down the screen,” she tells me. “That's what the data looks like in 1977. Imagine as if somebody was printing out the matrix numbers falling down, so it's loads of different numbers and letters all coming down, and the higher those numbers – they went from one to nine – to higher intensity.”If the intensity got beyond nine, the computer would switch to letters, starting with A then moving to Z as the highest. The “Wow!” signal observation got as high as Q.“They never had anything like that,” said Chapman.The signal was so bright, and lasted for over a minute. Then it vanished.Had it been a natural phenomenon — like Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s pulsars — you’d expect to see it again and again. But it was a single burst. A signal flair, perhaps. And it was never seen again.“I’m not saying there was an alien with a green finger literally turning it off, but something really strange happened.”Chapman is puzzled by the fact that after the signal, there was very little scientific attention. It was treated more as gossip than a scientific finding. But recently, within the past decade or so, there’s been more follow up.“We don't know it's a false alarm,” she said. “What the “Wow!” signal is, is one of the few times in human history that we have heard what appears to have all of the characteristics of an extraterrestrial radio signal.”The false alarms we’ve been talking about in this podcast are just a handful of the dozens that we’ve discovered over the years. But for decades, the “Wow!” signal has continued to puzzle scientists.We’re still not sure it was a false alarm. What could it be?“Am I saying it's definitely aliens? Just to be clear, absolutely not. I'm saying we are still in the trenches of science with this one,” Chapman said. “We are still trying to work out what it is, and we do not know."

Full show notes at the publisher

When We Find Them: Episode 1: Searching for life in the universe — **Searching for life in the universe** Sep 23, 2026
Show notes

If scientists ever found evidence that we are not alone in the universe, what would happen next?
I posed that question to Bill Diamond, CEO of the SETI Institute in 2023 during an interview for our podcast Are We There Yet?.
“Well,” he told us “we’d probably call a press conference.”
For what is likely to be the most consequential scientific discovery for humanity, the answer to how we would tell the world we’re not alone in the universe was a press conference.
As a journalist covering space for more than a decade, I’ve covered hundreds of press conferences. They’re usually pretty mundane – a mission status update, the announcement of a new launch contract. Sometimes, they can be quite exciting, like when NASA named the crew of the Artemis II moon mission.
But news of cosmic neighbors would certainly outweigh even that excitement. It was hard to think about how I might cover that press conference. Thinking about that day, as a journalist, is the catalyst to this podcast.
For most of human history, we have asked “are we alone?” Centuries ago, it was the philosophers and the priests asking the question. These days, it’s the scientist leading the charge to find the answer.
And everyone in between is curious, probably even you, if only just a little, of what that answer might be.
Moonrise over the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array (VLA)(Bettymaya Foott / RAO/AUI/NSF)
We’re on the verge of answering that question. Arrays of massive radio telescopes are listening to the vast universe for any signs of some other species saying hello. We’re peering into the atmospheres of far-away planets, ones that exist both inside and outside our own solar system for chemical signs of life — be it breaths, or pollution, or even farts, on another world. Closer to home, robotic explorers are digging up what they hope may be signs of ancient microbial life on one of our closest celestial neighbors.
What happens when we find the answer?
For this podcast, I reached out to all sorts of experts: scientists, scholars, religious leaders, anthropologists, politicians and journalists. They all told me the same thing — they expect an answer. Not proof of little green men or flying saucers, but real, definitive evidence of something and sooner than most people think.
It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.
But what almost none of them could tell me, definitively, is what happens next. Who announces such a finding? What would the discovery do to us humans? How would it change our cultures, our religions, our understanding of science as we know it now? Would we even believe it?
And what happens in the murky, sprawling weeks or even years between “we saw something strange” and “we are confident this is real?”
This podcast follows the people that are trying to answer those questions before that day arrives, and we find that the plan is far less finished than you might assume.
Searching for a Land of Oz
Modern efforts to search for life in the universe can be traced back to one boy.
Frank Drake was born on May 28, 1930 in Chicago. His mother was a music teacher and his father a chemical engineer. Growing up during the Great Depression, Frank would hear stories from his father about the night sky – about other worlds out there, like the baron planets in our solar system.
“But Dad, who was like six or eight years old at the time, he didn't know that, and he thought that my grandfather was referring to other worlds like Earth,” recalls Nadia Drake, a science journalist and daughter of Frank. “He started to wonder, did those places really exist, and if so, could he find them, and could we maybe actually communicate with whomever lived there.”
Frank Drake studied astronomy, getting his PhD from Harvard in 1958 as one of the first radio astronomers.His first job was at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
It was there, in 1960, where he would get that chance to try and detect those other civilizations in our universe that young Frank wondered about. That year, he convinced the observatory director to give him $2,000 to conduct the first search for life outside our own planet.
He named his search Project Ozma — after the queen in L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz, a series Frank Drake loved as a kid.
“Oz is a strange land full of strange and exotic creatures, and he imagined that the worlds that he was searching for may be similar in that sense,” Nadia Drake said. “He wanted to bring Oz back into life.”
A young Frank Drake poses in front of a large radio telescope.( NRAO/SETI Institute)
To search for that land full of strange and exotic creatures, for six hours a day from April to July 1960, Frank pointed an 85-foot antenna at two stars some 11 light years away, or about 64 trillion miles from Earth.
The two target stars were much like our own sun. “He reasoned that if those stars had planets in orbit around them, as the sun does, and if those planets were anything like Earth, with civilizations that were anything like ours, then they would be releasing distinctly artificial radio signals into the cosmos,” Nadia Drake told me.
Frank Drake calculated that his telescope could detect those signals. So that’s what he tried to do – he listened around those two stars.
He was looking for someone just like us. To do that, he was listening for a very specific radio frequency. One he thought an alien civilization would use to say “Hello! We’re over here!”
Chart paper from Frank Drake’s Project Ozma observation( Nadia Drake)
The team used a chart recorder – an instrument that uses a pen to draw squiggles that correspond to a signal on a roll of paper. They used it to track any cosmic blips that would indicate that cosmic greeting and a loudspeaker to let them know if there was anything worth listening to.
But there was silence. Frank didn’t find that strange land he hoped to find as a kid. Our galaxy, it seemed, was quiet.
And we were alone.
The experiment, however, wasn’t considered a failure. It marked the first time anyone conducted a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – the beginning of the era of SETI.
The Drake Equation
A year after Project Ozma, Frank Drake was asked to convene a meeting by the National Academy of Sciences specifically about the search for life, at the same observatory he used to carry out that groundbreaking search. It was a new field of study. So Frank invited everyone he knew interested in the topic – that turned out to be about a dozen people.
Despite the small size, Frank needed to make the most of the conference. He sketched out an agenda he thought might be worth discussing over the next three days.
“When he looked at the list of discussion topics, he realized that if he organized them in the form of an equation,” said Nadia Drake. “He just wrote down his meeting agenda in the form of an equation, just put it on the chalkboard, and that kicked off everything.”
The formula aimed to calculate the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. It would be known as the Drake Equation and it single handedly shaped the trajectory of efforts to search for life beyond our own planet.
Frank Drake poses in front of white board with the Drake Equation( SETI Institute)
The Drake equation isn’t something you can solve – at least not yet. It’s an estimation of just how many civilizations might be out there. It “tells you how many detectable civilizations there are in the Milky Way galaxy based on the values that you put in for seven variables, and you're just going to multiply all of these variables together,” said Nadia Drake. When you do, you get N, or the estimation of the number of civilizations in the galaxy.
The Drake Equation as written is:
N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
The first variable R* is the rate of new star formation – how many new stars are born each year? Variable fp is the fraction of those stars with planetary systems, ne is the number of planets per system with an environment suitable for life. The fraction of suitable planets on which life appears is fl, and fi is the fraction of those planets on which intelligent life emerges. The final two variables are fc – the fraction of civilizations that develop technology that produces a detectable signal and L – the average length of time such civilizations produce those signs of life.
“You can kind of see how you're starting with something that's really very big, and just breaking it into smaller and smaller things: stars, planets, life, intelligence, technology,” said Nadia Drake. “You end up multiplying it all together, and you get this number that tells you how many detectable civilizations there are. We know there's at least one.”
That’s us. Planet Earth. Human beings. N is greater than or equal to 1.
When Frank Drake wrote that equation in 1961 there was only one variable that he kind of knew the value to – that was the rate of formation of stars. Everything else would have been just a guess.
But since 1961, our understanding of the equation’s variables have increased exponentially.
“We now know the answers to some of those questions pretty well,” said Josh Colwell, a planetary scientist and dean of the College of Sciences at the University of Central Florida.
“We know how many stars are in the Milky Way galaxy, we know a pretty good census of what kinds of stars there are.. We know a lot more now than we did even a few decades ago about how many planets there are,” he said. “So, with a whole bunch of those parameters we’ve got actual numbers that we really know what they are.”
The confirmation of exoplanets has been the biggest driver in getting a better answer to the Drake equation. Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system that orbit other stars — that’s the variable fp that asks the fraction of stars that have planets.
Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) throughout the galaxy. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center )
In the time of the formation of the Drake equation that confirmed number was zero. It was just a hypothesis that there were other planets orbiting other stars. But now, some 65 years later, scientists have confirmed over 6,000 and are now pretty confident that every star has planets.
So when you look up tonight at all those stars in the sky, imagine each of those stars having a handful of planets orbiting it.
In our Milky Way Galaxy Alone, there are billions of stars. That means there are trillions of planets. Surely there’s got to be one that’s just like ours — one with the potential to harbor life. Maybe one that’s at a distance from its star that’s not too hot or not too cold. One that has oceans, oxygen, and plants. One that has living organisms just like ours.
With that many potential planets, why haven’t we found anyone yet?
Where are they?
That vast contradiction is highlighted in what’s known as the Fermi Paradox. Quite simply, it asks: where is everyone?
There are a number of reasons why we haven’t found anyone yet. Maybe there are plenty of civilizations out there, they just haven’t figured out a way to travel to us yet. Or maybe it’s just a quiet time in galactic history. There also could be civilizations out there that just don’t want to be found.
“Or maybe civilizations never actually get to that point,” where they can travel to other star systems, said Colwell. “That gets to this concept called the Great Filter, which says something happens that prevents life from getting to the point where it could colonize the galaxy, so to speak.
The Fermi Paradox seems like a buzzkill for anyone searching for life outside our own planet. Some argue it should be taken with caution — it comes to a cast conclusion using limited observations. It’s like saying alligators don’t exist because you live in Colorado and never saw one in your backyard. Well they do exist. And as a Floridian I’ve seen plenty in my backyard.
Still, thousands of scientists are hard at work, each day, scanning the skies for any signs of life out there and chasing the day that they may one day hear something.
To those people, the Fermi Paradox is not a discouragement. It’s a call to action and underscores how important these efforts are to collect more data and eventually break the silence.
In 1960, during Frank Drake’s listening experiment, his team thought they heard something. And for that brief moment, Drake thought he made the discovery of a lifetime. He recalled that moment in an interview with the SETI Institute decades later.
“When you see that, and you think you're sure you have detected another civilization, you feel a very special emotion. It is different from all other emotions” he said. “I can't really describe it to you, but it's an emotion of elation, in a sense, that you are now part of some much greater world of knowledge and activity, and you have sort of gone through a door into a world of new facts, phenomena, creatures that populate our universe. It's a very powerful motion because you sense that what you're seeing is going to change all of history, and I think for the better.”

**Searching for life in the universe** Sep 23, 2026
Show notes

If scientists ever found evidence that we are not alone in the universe, what would happen next?
I posed that question to Bill Diamond, CEO of the SETI Institute in 2023 during an interview for our podcast Are We There Yet?.
“Well,” he told us “we’d probably call a press conference.”
For what is likely to be the most consequential scientific discovery for humanity, the answer to how we would tell the world we’re not alone in the universe was a press conference.
As a journalist covering space for more than a decade, I’ve covered hundreds of press conferences. They’re usually pretty mundane – a mission status update, the announcement of a new launch contract. Sometimes, they can be quite exciting, like when NASA named the crew of the Artemis II moon mission.
But news of cosmic neighbors would certainly outweigh even that excitement. It was hard to think about how I might cover that press conference. Thinking about that day, as a journalist, is the catalyst to this podcast.
For most of human history, we have asked “are we alone?” Centuries ago, it was the philosophers and the priests asking the question. These days, it’s the scientist leading the charge to find the answer.
And everyone in between is curious, probably even you, if only just a little, of what that answer might be.
Moonrise over the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array (VLA)(Bettymaya Foott / RAO/AUI/NSF)
We’re on the verge of answering that question. Arrays of massive radio telescopes are listening to the vast universe for any signs of some other species saying hello. We’re peering into the atmospheres of far-away planets, ones that exist both inside and outside our own solar system for chemical signs of life — be it breaths, or pollution, or even farts, on another world. Closer to home, robotic explorers are digging up what they hope may be signs of ancient microbial life on one of our closest celestial neighbors.
What happens when we find the answer?
For this podcast, I reached out to all sorts of experts: scientists, scholars, religious leaders, anthropologists, politicians and journalists. They all told me the same thing — they expect an answer. Not proof of little green men or flying saucers, but real, definitive evidence of something and sooner than most people think.
It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.
But what almost none of them could tell me, definitively, is what happens next. Who announces such a finding? What would the discovery do to us humans? How would it change our cultures, our religions, our understanding of science as we know it now? Would we even believe it?
And what happens in the murky, sprawling weeks or even years between “we saw something strange” and “we are confident this is real?”
This podcast follows the people that are trying to answer those questions before that day arrives, and we find that the plan is far less finished than you might assume.
Searching for a Land of Oz
Modern efforts to search for life in the universe can be traced back to one boy.
Frank Drake was born on May 28, 1930 in Chicago. His mother was a music teacher and his father a chemical engineer. Growing up during the Great Depression, Frank would hear stories from his father about the night sky – about other worlds out there, like the baron planets in our solar system.
“But Dad, who was like six or eight years old at the time, he didn't know that, and he thought that my grandfather was referring to other worlds like Earth,” recalls Nadia Drake, a science journalist and daughter of Frank. “He started to wonder, did those places really exist, and if so, could he find them, and could we maybe actually communicate with whomever lived there.”
Frank Drake studied astronomy, getting his PhD from Harvard in 1958 as one of the first radio astronomers.His first job was at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
It was there, in 1960, where he would get that chance to try and detect those other civilizations in our universe that young Frank wondered about. That year, he convinced the observatory director to give him $2,000 to conduct the first search for life outside our own planet.
He named his search Project Ozma — after the queen in L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz, a series Frank Drake loved as a kid.
“Oz is a strange land full of strange and exotic creatures, and he imagined that the worlds that he was searching for may be similar in that sense,” Nadia Drake said. “He wanted to bring Oz back into life.”
A young Frank Drake poses in front of a large radio telescope.( NRAO/SETI Institute)
To search for that land full of strange and exotic creatures, for six hours a day from April to July 1960, Frank pointed an 85-foot antenna at two stars some 11 light years away, or about 64 trillion miles from Earth.
The two target stars were much like our own sun. “He reasoned that if those stars had planets in orbit around them, as the sun does, and if those planets were anything like Earth, with civilizations that were anything like ours, then they would be releasing distinctly artificial radio signals into the cosmos,” Nadia Drake told me.
Frank Drake calculated that his telescope could detect those signals. So that’s what he tried to do – he listened around those two stars.
He was looking for someone just like us. To do that, he was listening for a very specific radio frequency. One he thought an alien civilization would use to say “Hello! We’re over here!”
Chart paper from Frank Drake’s Project Ozma observation( Nadia Drake)
The team used a chart recorder – an instrument that uses a pen to draw squiggles that correspond to a signal on a roll of paper. They used it to track any cosmic blips that would indicate that cosmic greeting and a loudspeaker to let them know if there was anything worth listening to.
But there was silence. Frank didn’t find that strange land he hoped to find as a kid. Our galaxy, it seemed, was quiet.
And we were alone.
The experiment, however, wasn’t considered a failure. It marked the first time anyone conducted a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – the beginning of the era of SETI.
The Drake Equation
A year after Project Ozma, Frank Drake was asked to convene a meeting by the National Academy of Sciences specifically about the search for life, at the same observatory he used to carry out that groundbreaking search. It was a new field of study. So Frank invited everyone he knew interested in the topic – that turned out to be about a dozen people.
Despite the small size, Frank needed to make the most of the conference. He sketched out an agenda he thought might be worth discussing over the next three days.
“When he looked at the list of discussion topics, he realized that if he organized them in the form of an equation,” said Nadia Drake. “He just wrote down his meeting agenda in the form of an equation, just put it on the chalkboard, and that kicked off everything.”
The formula aimed to calculate the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. It would be known as the Drake Equation and it single handedly shaped the trajectory of efforts to search for life beyond our own planet.
Frank Drake poses in front of white board with the Drake Equation( SETI Institute)
The Drake equation isn’t something you can solve – at least not yet. It’s an estimation of just how many civilizations might be out there. It “tells you how many detectable civilizations there are in the Milky Way galaxy based on the values that you put in for seven variables, and you're just going to multiply all of these variables together,” said Nadia Drake. When you do, you get N, or the estimation of the number of civilizations in the galaxy.
The Drake Equation as written is:
N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
The first variable R* is the rate of new star formation – how many new stars are born each year? Variable fp is the fraction of those stars with planetary systems, ne is the number of planets per system with an environment suitable for life. The fraction of suitable planets on which life appears is fl, and fi is the fraction of those planets on which intelligent life emerges. The final two variables are fc – the fraction of civilizations that develop technology that produces a detectable signal and L – the average length of time such civilizations produce those signs of life.
“You can kind of see how you're starting with something that's really very big, and just breaking it into smaller and smaller things: stars, planets, life, intelligence, technology,” said Nadia Drake. “You end up multiplying it all together, and you get this number that tells you how many detectable civilizations there are. We know there's at least one.”
That’s us. Planet Earth. Human beings. N is greater than or equal to 1.
When Frank Drake wrote that equation in 1961 there was only one variable that he kind of knew the value to – that was the rate of formation of stars. Everything else would have been just a guess.
But since 1961, our understanding of the equation’s variables have increased exponentially.
“We now know the answers to some of those questions pretty well,” said Josh Colwell, a planetary scientist and dean of the College of Sciences at the University of Central Florida.
“We know how many stars are in the Milky Way galaxy, we know a pretty good census of what kinds of stars there are.. We know a lot more now than we did even a few decades ago about how many planets there are,” he said. “So, with a whole bunch of those parameters we’ve got actual numbers that we really know what they are.”
The confirmation of exoplanets has been the biggest driver in getting a better answer to the Drake equation. Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system that orbit other stars — that’s the variable fp that asks the fraction of stars that have planets.
Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) throughout the galaxy. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center )
In the time of the formation of the Drake equation that confirmed number was zero. It was just a hypothesis that there were other planets orbiting other stars. But now, some 65 years later, scientists have confirmed over 6,000 and are now pretty confident that every star has planets.
So when you look up tonight at all those stars in the sky, imagine each of those stars having a handful of planets orbiting it.
In our Milky Way Galaxy Alone, there are billions of stars. That means there are trillions of planets. Surely there’s got to be one that’s just like ours — one with the potential to harbor life. Maybe one that’s at a distance from its star that’s not too hot or not too cold. One that has oceans, oxygen, and plants. One that has living organisms just like ours.
With that many potential planets, why haven’t we found anyone yet?
Where are they?
That vast contradiction is highlighted in what’s known as the Fermi Paradox. Quite simply, it asks: where is everyone?
There are a number of reasons why we haven’t found anyone yet. Maybe there are plenty of civilizations out there, they just haven’t figured out a way to travel to us yet. Or maybe it’s just a quiet time in galactic history. There also could be civilizations out there that just don’t want to be found.
“Or maybe civilizations never actually get to that point,” where they can travel to other star systems, said Colwell. “That gets to this concept called the Great Filter, which says something happens that prevents life from getting to the point where it could colonize the galaxy, so to speak.
The Fermi Paradox seems like a buzzkill for anyone searching for life outside our own planet. Some argue it should be taken with caution — it comes to a cast conclusion using limited observations. It’s like saying alligators don’t exist because you live in Colorado and never saw one in your backyard. Well they do exist. And as a Floridian I’ve seen plenty in my backyard.
Still, thousands of scientists are hard at work, each day, scanning the skies for any signs of life out there and chasing the day that they may one day hear something.
To those people, the Fermi Paradox is not a discouragement. It’s a call to action and underscores how important these efforts are to collect more data and eventually break the silence.
In 1960, during Frank Drake’s listening experiment, his team thought they heard something. And for that brief moment, Drake thought he made the discovery of a lifetime. He recalled that moment in an interview with the SETI Institute decades later.
“When you see that, and you think you're sure you have detected another civilization, you feel a very special emotion. It is different from all other emotions” he said. “I can't really describe it to you, but it's an emotion of elation, in a sense, that you are now part of some much greater world of knowledge and activity, and you have sort of gone through a door into a world of new facts, phenomena, creatures that populate our universe. It's a very powerful motion because you sense that what you're seeing is going to change all of history, and I think for the better.”

Purple and green image of night sky, satellite radio dishes and human silhouettes looking up at the sky. Text overlay that reads "When We Find Them Podcast from Central Florida Pubic Media." — **Trailer: When We Find Them podcast** Sep 11, 2026
Show notes

“When We Find Them” is a new limited podcast series from Central Florida Public Media that looks at our search for life in the universe and the not so finished plan to tell the world what we find.
We’ll look at our current efforts to search for life, the protocols in place to confirm such an extraordinary finding, and look at how we – as humans – may react when our entire worldview changes.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

When We Find Them

Searching for a Land of Oz

The Drake Equation

Where are they?

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected