‘The Contact Paradox’ sums up the search for extraterrestrials

There’s a name that keeps cropping up throughout “The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” Keith Cooper’s fantastic entry in the Bloomsbury Sigma series of science-related titles. It’s Frank Drake, the American  astronomer and astrophysicist who in 1961 came up with the thought experiment known as the Drake Equation, a very rough series of estimations about the various factors Drake considered necessary for an