Frank Drake, the astronomer who came up with the Drake Equation has passed at his home in Santa Cruz. The equation, devised in 1951 is an attempt to estimate how many extra-terrestrial civilizations there might be throughout our galaxy. He was also the founder of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, an organization whose mission is to utilize existing resources, usually radio telescopes, to search for non-natural signals which might have originated from distant worlds.

Drake was 92 years old.