James Davenport

I hijacked my parents' little Gateway 2000, and I absolutely cooked it, trying to contribute...

So it seemed like the thing, right?

It seemed like the one opportunity living in the middle of nowhere and sort of like rural eastern Washington, like, oh, I can be part of this journey that humankind is on.

It was amazing.

So for five minutes on the hour for several days, they would black out all radio transmissions in the U.S.

And they would listen.

They would point the radio telescopes or the radio transmitters they had at Mars, and they would listen for signs of, you know, Martian NPR.

Spoiler, they didn't find anything.

There was no Martian NPR.

If the thing we were looking for was the size of the ocean, so far, as of about 2000, we had looked at a pint glass of water compared to the volume of the ocean.

So the Drake equation is the number of stars times the fraction of those stars that should have intelligent life.

It's capable of sending us signals.

In its simplest form, it's the number of stars times the fraction of stars that have NPR.

Or something like that.

Now, what goes into that NPR term?

Well, you have to have a planet.

It has to be at that Goldilocks distance from its parent star.

It has to have water.

It has to have all the ingredients that we know and many of the ingredients we don't know.

And there's a lot we don't know about what drives life.