Raise Money by Accomplishing Nothing
Frank Drake is being honored on Space.com by the SETI Institute as the “Father of SETI,” His reputation is providing an opportunity for a fund raiser. For a lot of money, you can spend time with a celebrity whose accomplishments are questionable.
It’s not often you get the opportunity to hang out with a legend! Spend some quality time with Frank Drake, the founder of modern SETI, and author of the Drake Equation.
At a donor level of $50,000 – 100,000, you can spend one to two days with Frank, as he takes you behind the scenes to the optical SETI experiment at Lick Observatory, and explains both the science and the technology. A personalized tour of this observatory would be special in itself. Doing so in the company of Frank Drake is not just a rare opportunity: it’s unique.
What some may consider unique, however, is the lack of measurable accomplishment for a celebrity scientist. His achievements have been more motivational than empirical. He founded a search for “signals of intelligent origin” in space that has found nothing since his first attempt in 1960. In addition, his well-known “Drake equation” that purports to calculate the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy is simply a list of requirements for naturalistic evolution put into quasi-authoritative algebraic terms. The factors are so little known, however, that famous origin-of-life researcher Stanley Miller once remarked that one could put any values one chooses into the equation and the result would be just as valid as any other one’s estimate.
The Drake Equation is a joke. It’s nothing more than a propaganda tool for atheistic cosmology, using visualization to give an air of scientific authority to ignorance. He left out the only term that can bring the possibility of life above absolute zero: intelligent causation. Only a fool would throw good money at ignorance (10/12/2007).
The most egregious thing in Drake’s know-nothing resume (08/22/2008, 05/01/2008, 08/17/2007, 02/11/2007, 01/24/2007) has been the founding of a society that is dead-set against intelligent design (02/20/2007), while employing intelligent design principles in its core strategy (12/03/2005). SETI should be renamed the Search for Evolutionary Tricks of Imagination (04/17/2008, 04/01/2008, 03/17/2008). Thanks to Brett Miller for illustrating this in another clever cartoon.