NONFICTION - Nov. 22, 1992

IS ANYONE OUT THERE?: The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by Frank Drake with Dava Sobel (Delacorte Press: $22; 288 pp.). “Forty years as an astronomer,” Frank Drake begins in these pages, “have not quelled my enthusiasm for lying outside after dark, staring at the stars.” We have come to expect such youthful wonder from astronomers ever since Carl Sagan marveled at “billions and billions of stars,” and in this wise, candid and clearly written book, Drake delivers. Jubilantly he describes how he helped design the message plaque for Pioneer 10 (denounced by one Times reader as sending “smut through space”) and how he helped write an intergalactic radio message in binary numbers that to his great surprise, sounded like a song, “unique and full of yearning,” when played over loudspeakers. (When the $100 million, decade-long Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Project that he initiated got off the ground last month, Drake’s attention turned to receiving messages.)

Lest we get carried away with the notion of astronomer-as-angel, though, it should be pointed out that anyone who manages to coax $100 million from Congress has to possess some Earthly political savvy. Drake says he wrote this book “to prepare thinking adults for the outcome of the present search activity--the imminent detection of signals from an extraterrestrial civilization,” but as he never attempts such psychological preparation, one suspects his real motivation is to secure the public’s financial and moral support. Thus, we are unsure whether he is writing as huckster or scientist when he says that he “fully expects” to witness the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life “before the year 2000.” Drake’s soaring optimism is certainly open to question; it rides on the assumption, for one, that 1% of alien civilizations will have a lifetime of a billion years--a big “if” given that humans have come close to destroying themselves after only a few thousand years. Nevertheless Drake manages to make even skeptics among us feel fuddy-duddyish with this quote from 4th Century Greek philosopher Metrodorus: “To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow.”