Back in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake put chalk to board and devised a formula to estimate the number of communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Just how many alien societies exist and are detectable?
And there's also the paradoxical query asked a decade earlier by physicist Enrico Fermi.
Over the decades, researchers have been trying to come up with answers to these questions. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a mix of technology, super-smart software and patience, along with creative thinking. For example, maybe the problem isn't us or our methods.
